Hedonic qualities (Emotional Experience) of Human with Computers

In the recent decade, the idea of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) in psycho-physio metrics perceived developing interest. Recently, HCI extended its point of view on the nature of intuitive items and has grown as a research field (Cowley et al., 2016).

Image Courtesy: Listening Partnership

Psychophysiology combines mental and bodily processes, physiological computing has developed as an exploration field at present. It can measure human physiology and state of mind. Human-computer interaction (HCI) can be efficiently applied by using psycho-physio metric sensors. These are few biological aspects that contribute to determining a human mood, for instance, blood rate, brain wave, skin conductance, heartbeat etc (Cowley et al., 2016).

Despite the fact of experience can be pleasant or unpleasant, Hassenzahl explained HCI in Usability Engineering, can remove potential dissatisfaction, “The real advancement of an experiential approach is in understanding and focusing on what makes an experience positive, pleasurable, good”.

The given example below better explains the reason behind the idea of pleasure:

Imagine a train running late by an hour. This has a high potential to be a frustrating, negative experience, with all its harmful consequences. But, again imagine the train being exactly on time. There will not be any types of negative feelings because the train is on time. Moreover, there will also not be any excitement or feeling of happiness because nothing special happened more than expected (Hassenzahl, 2010).

As Chérie Carter-Scott stated, “Pleasure is the physical manifestation of joy”. The field of HCI requires the study of psycho-physio metrics because correlations between psycho-physio metrics and the pleasure of humans are very weak (Hudlicka, 2003).

Image Courtesy: ADInstruments

The challenging part in building an emotion detection system is the automatic recognition of the human psychological state, especially pleasant and unpleasant feelings. Hedonic qualities of HCI are difficult to process by computer systems (Zimmermann et al., 2003). There is a huge gap to be filled in this research area. That’s why it requires investigation of the scientific approach to add HCI with the psycho-physio metric of humans.