Affective Embedded Systems: a Requirement Engineering Approach

Abstract

This paper proposes an embedded system development process able to deal with affectivity requirements. This process includes W3C tools, such as EmotionML and SysML, in order to specify cognition and affectivity as system requirements. It combines three different integration models: Sparx's (1) and Wolf's System Development Processes (4) and Russell's Intelligent Agent Specification (5). In order to validate our model, a pet robot case study was built. This application can be useful in many homecare applications, such as assistive robots for capturing attention of autistic children and robot therapy for elders. Moreover, it represents a futuristic embedded system design space for applying affective computing.