Affective analysis of patients in homecare video-assisted telemedicine using computational intelligence

The affective/emotional status of patients is strongly connected to the healing process and their health. Therefore, being aware of the psychological peaks and troughs of a patient provides the advantage of timely intervention by specialists or closely related kinsfolk. In this context, this paper presents the design and implementation of an emotion analysis module integrated in an existing telemedicine platform. Two different methodologies are utilized and discussed. The first scheme exploits the fast and consistent properties of the speeded-up robust features algorithm in order to identify the existence of seven different sentiments in human faces. The second is based on convolutional neural networks. The whole functionality is provided as a Web service for the healthcare platform during regular video teleconference sessions between authorized medical personnel and patients. The paper discusses the technical details of the implementation and the incorporation of the proposed scheme and provides the initial results of its accuracy and operation in practice.