Gender-specific approaches to developing emotionally intelligent learning companions

Researchers adopted gender-specific approaches, to develop emotionally intelligent learning companions for students. Researchers built a multimodal real-time affect-agent research platform that incorporated a facial-expression camera,a pressure mouse, a skin-conductance sensor, and a posture chair for sensor-driven nonverbal mirroring. They used the platform to develop elements of an affective learning companion's emotional intelligence that was defined as the presence of appropriate affect-support or task-support intervention, congruence, and type of nonverbal mirroring. The system developed by researchers collected data from the sensors about affective states of the users, enabling the data to be processed offline, with a classifier to determine affective state and in real-time through a system server, to influence the character's interactions with the user.