Nadia Berthouze, University College London, UK

Recent years have seen the emergence of technology that involves, requires and allows its users to be engaged through their body. This has made it possible to better exploit and understand this modality to capture, respond to and regulate users' affective experience and also to widen the set of channels for human-robot interaction. Prof. Berthouze will report on her team’s studies aimed at using this modality to induce and recognize affective states in users interacting with technology. Through different studies and contexts, Prof. Berthouze will analyze how people perceive and express affect through body movement and touch behavior. In doing so, she will also present her team’s work on automatic recognition of naturalistic affective body expressions in computer games, laughter in dyadic interaction and pain-related emotions in physical rehabilitation. Finally Prof. Berthouze will discuss challenges and opportunities for empathic interaction in the context of chronic pain.