Transforming knowledge capture in healthcare: Opportunistic and Context-aware affect Sensing on Smartphones

Recent advances in smartphone technology make it possible to gather affective information opportunistically during everyday activities including patient information. Better quality real time information is expected to assist in better decision making and better patient monitoring. This can lead to better outcomes and improved costs. Opportunistic affect sensing involves the capture of spontaneous affective behaviour, which contains rich latent information about a person's emotional and psychological states. As affect sensing has been performed in laboratory environments, information about scalability, accessibility and representativeness is limited. In this paper, attention is given to current advances of affective sensing on the smartphone platform. Emphasis is given to opportunistic sensing using audio and video modalities, as they offer the most powerful information yet the most difficult computational and privacy related challenges. As affective response is largely controlled by the ambient environment, this paper further discusses context aware affect sensing presenting the current landscape of context aware affective sensing on smartphone. The paper concludes by outlining the key barriers to successful implementation of opportunistic and context aware affect sensing on smartphones. The paper also offers potential solutions and suggests managerial and practical approaches for healthcare.