An Emotion Aware Task Automation Architecture Based on Semantic Technologies for Smart Offices

Work Engagement Recognition in Smart Office

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced a sudden change of traditional office works to smart working models, which however force many workers staying at home with a significant increase of sedentary lifestyle. Metabolic disorders, mental illnesses, and musculoskeletal injuries are also caused by the physical inactivity and chronic stress at work, threatening office workers' physical and physiological health. In the modern vision of smart workplaces, cyber-physical systems play a central role to augment objects, environments, and workers with integrated sensing, data processing, and communication capabilities. In this context, a work engagement system is proposed to monitor psycho-physical comfort and provide health suggestion to the office workers. Recognizing their activity, such as sitting postures and facial expressions, could help assessing the level of work engagement. In particular, head and body posture could reflects their state of engagement, boredom or neutral condition. In this paper we proposed a method to recognize such activities using an infrared sensor array by analyzing the sitting postures. The proposed approach can unobstructively sense their activities in a privacy-preserving way. To evaluate the performance of the system, a working scenario has been set up, and their activities were annotated by reviewing the video of the subjects. We carried out an experimental analysis and compared Decision Tree and k-NN classifiers, both of them showed high recognition rate for the eight postures. As to the work engagement assessment, we analyzed the sitting postures to give the users suggestions to take a break when the postures such as lean left/right with arm support, lean left/right without arm support happens very often.

Semantic Modeling of a VLC-Enabled Task Automation Platform for Smart Offices

The evolution of ambient intelligence has introduced a range of new opportunities to improve people’s well-being. One of these opportunities is the use of these technologies to enhance workplaces and improve employees’ comfort and productivity. However, these technologies often entail two major challenges: the requirement for fast and reliable data transmission between the vast number of devices connected simultaneously, and the interoperability between these devices. Conventional communication technologies present some drawbacks in these kinds of systems, such as lower data rates and electromagnetic interference, which have prompted research into new wireless communication technologies. One of these technologies is visible light communication (VLC), which uses existing light in an environment to transmit data. Its characteristics make it an up-and-coming technology for IoT services but also aggravate the interoperability challenge. To facilitate the continuous communication of the enormous amount of heterogeneous data generated, highly agile data models are required. The semantic approach tackles this problem by switching from ad hoc application-centric representation models and formats to a formal definition of concepts and relationships. This paper aims to advance the state of the art by proposing a semantic vocabulary for an intelligent automation platform with VLC enabled, which benefits from the advantages of VLC while ensuring the scalability and interoperability of all system components. Thus, the main contributions of this work are threefold: (i) the design and definition of a semantic model for an automation platform; (ii) the development of a prototype automation platform based on a VLC-based communication system; and (iii) the integration and validation of the proposed semantic model in the VLC-based automation platform.

A Practical Experience on the Amazon Alexa Integration in Smart Offices

Smart offices are dynamically evolving spaces meant to enhance employees' efficiency, but also to create a healthy and proactive working environment. In a competitive business world, the challenge of providing a balance between the efficiency and wellbeing of employees may be supported with new technologies. This paper presents the work undertaken to build the architecture needed to integrate voice assistants into smart offices in order to support employees in their daily activities, like ambient control, attendance system and reporting, but also interacting with project management services used for planning, issue tracking, and reporting. Our research tries to understand what are the most accepted tasks to be performed with the help of voice assistants in a smart office environment, by analyzing the system based on task completion and sentiment analysis. For the experimental setup, different test cases were developed in order to interact with the office environment formed by specific devices, as well as with the project management tool tasks. The obtained results demonstrated that the interaction with the voice assistant is reasonable, especially for easy and moderate utterances.

Tourist Recommender Systems Based on Emotion Recognition—A Scientometric Review

Recommendation systems have overcome the overload of irrelevant information by considering users’ preferences and emotional states in the fields of tourism, health, e-commerce, and entertainment. This article reviews the principal recommendation approach documents found in scientific databases (Elsevier’s Scopus and Clarivate Web of Science) through a scientometric analysis in ScientoPy. Research publications related to the recommenders of emotion-based tourism cover the last two decades. The review highlights the collection, processing, and feature extraction of data from sensors and wearables to detect emotions. The study proposes the thematic categories of recommendation systems, emotion recognition, wearable technology, and machine learning. This paper also presents the evolution, trend analysis, theoretical background, and algorithmic approaches used to implement recommenders. Finally, the discussion section provides guidelines for designing emotion-sensitive tourist recommenders.