Detection of Affective States of the Students in a Blended Learning Environment Comprising of Smartphones

ABSTRACT

Consideration of affective states of students in the teaching-learning process is very important. However, it is cumbersome for a teacher to detect the states in real-time, especially in a large classroom. Although literature contains many techniques for systematic detection of the affective states, most of them either are expensive both in terms of computational and economical aspects or do not fit in the classroom environment. Assuming a blended learning environment comprising smartphones, we have proposed a process model to detect the affective states of the students. Empirical studies affirm that the model is able to detect the states with high accuracy. Apart from training and testing the model with affective data collected through a novel game designed by us, the model has been additionally validated with EEG signals of thirty six participants.

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank all the students who have participated in the empirical studies conducted for building and validating the proposed model. They would also like to sincerely acknowledge the assistance of Nilotpal Biswas (for coding), and Md Shakeel Iqbal Saikia (for proofreading). The authors are indeed thankful to the editor and the reviewers of IJHCI for their constructive criticisms and suggestions for the improvement of the manuscript.

Notes

1. https://www.emotiv.com/epoc/

2. https://www.emotiv.com/emotivpro/

3. $actualacceleration=\sqrt{(x^2+y^2+z^2})$; x, y, and z are the scalar component of the X, Y, and Z axes of the accelerometer sensor, respectively.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Subrata Tikadar

Subrata Tikadar is a Research Scholar at Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati (India). He received his M.Tech from National Institute of Technical Teachers’ Training and Research Kolkata, and B.E from University Institute of Technology BU (India). He is pursuing his doctoral research in Human-Computer Interaction, particularly in Affective Computing and Education Technology.

Samit Bhattacharya

Samit Bhattacharya is an Associate Professor at Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati (India). He received his B.Tech from Kalyani Govt Engineering College (India), and both the MS and Ph.D. from Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur (India). He is an active researcher in the field of Human-Computer Interaction with focus on User-Centric Computing.