Affective computing is becoming more and more important as it enables to extend the possibilities of computing technologies by incorporating emotions. In fact, the detection of users’ emotions has become one of the most important aspects regarding Affective Computing. In this paper, we present an educational software application that incorporates affective computing by detecting the users’ emotional states to adapt its behaviour to the emotions sensed. This way, we aim at increasing users’ engagement to keep them motivated for longer periods of time, thus improving their learning progress. To prove this, the application has been assessed with real users. The performance of a set of users using the proposed system has been compared with a control group that used the same system without implementing emotion detection. The outcomes of this evaluation have shown that our proposed system, incorporating affective computing, produced better results than the one used by the control group.

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Increasing screen real-estate allows for the development of applications where a single user can manage a large amount of data and related tasks through a distributed user interface. However, such users can easily become overloaded and become unaware of display changes as they alternate their attention towards different displays. We propose AwToolkit, a novel widget set for developers that supports users in maintaing awareness in multi-display systems. The AwToolkit widgets automatically determine which display a user is looking at and provide users with notifications with different levels of subtlety to make the user aware of any unattended display changes. The toolkit uses four notification levels (unnoticeable, subtle, intrusive and disruptive), ranging from an almost imperceptible visual change to a clear and visually saliant change. We describe AwToolkit's six widgets, which have been designed for C# developers, and the design of a user study with an application oriented towards healthcare environments. The evaluation results reveal a marked increase in user awareness in comparison to the same application implemented without AwToolkit.