About this Research Topic

Background

Biometric monitoring refers to the “conscious and unconscious changes of human traits and body parameters for assessing complex features such as emotions and behavior”. Biometric monitoring lays over a set of fundamental principles, such as:

• Body pose, walking development or facial expressions related to the emotional state of the subject.
• A variety of measurable body variables such as electro dermal activity, heart rate response and eye movement or pupil dilatation can be used to estimate the emotional stated and arousal of the subject.
• Gaze, head orientation or anticipatory postural adjustments give us information on the intended direction of movement, intention or attention.
• Kinematic and kinetic information of body segments define the individual’s motor activities.
• Human behavior and decision making are heavily influenced by affective states which in turn are rooted in biology.

Biometric monitoring is expected to drive breakthrough innovations for the foreseeable future in almost every kind of industrial sectors and social environments because of the human-centered approach that dominates nowadays the interaction between humans and technology across the globe.

From this perspective, this Research topic aims to contribute to basic research in emotion and behavior detection from biometric monitoring and to probe the interaction with computer and physical systems based on biometric monitoring. This will eventually lead to the development of artificial cooperative systems operating in novel “behavioral” and “emotional” affective dimensions. Without excluding other interesting potential application fields, we would like to foster advances in three main directions:

1.Biometric Data Collection and Processing. Novel architectures for biometric data collection are required, mixing environmental sensors for certain observable body parameters (facial expressions, body gestures, gait, etc.) and wearable sensors for other physiological signals including body segments’ accelerations, skin conductivity, temperature, EEG, HRV, brain activity, etc. Data collection is followed by complex technical problems to be solved such as feature extraction and selection, algorithm design, delivery of results, visualization and models and hard or soft user interaction systems. Additionally, there are ethical and moral questions that need further discussion in light of recurrent cases of privacy and security violations, e.g. unlawful use of data for political purposes.

2.Novel paradigms for Human Computer, Human-machine or human-robot interaction based on Biometric Monitoring. Biometric monitoring provides information inner to human decisions that opens up a whole new paradigm of emotion- and behavior-based interfaces and collaboration. Examples of this novel paradigm include games that adapt to the affective response of users, mobile robots that answer to real and perceived safety risks based on how people behave, self-driving cars that assess driver`s attention or stress and use it in their control policy, manufacturing machines designed to co-work and co-create with humans, rehabilitation devices and general medical devices that adapt their functioning to the comfort and safety of patient, etc.

3.Novel industrial and services applications of biometric monitoring. Since biometric monitoring gauges unconscious information about how people react in relation to products, objects, concepts, services and other persons, it is possible to provide information to enhance a wide range of elements that affect business competitivity such as buying experience, fraud detection, strategies of social selling, product design, store performance, workers safety, customer service, showcase testing, architectural efficiency, amongst others.

We welcome articles that address:

• Sensor architectures for biometric monitoring.
• Online and mobile biosignal processing and feature extraction.
• Ethical and moral issues with biometric monitoring.
• Machine Learning and artificial intelligence models for activity, behavior and emotion recognition.
• Novel Human-machine and computer-based interaction paradigms from biometric sensing.
• Knowledge transfer from social or medical sciences (e.g. neuroscience, psycho-psychology, sociology or anthropology) that assists in building better models of human behavior based on biological factors of emotions and behavior.
• Novel industrial applications of biometric sensing for the manufacturing, construction, textile or energy sector.
• Novel services based on biometric sensing for the retail, fashion, tourism or gastronomic sector.

Keywords: Biosignal processing, Biometric Monitoring, Behavior and emotion recognition, Human-Aware navigation and Affective Interaction, Human-Machine/Robot Interaction

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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