Assessing the user experience of older adults using a neural network trained to recognize emotions from brain signals

The use of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) technologies as a means to cope with problems that arise due to an increasing and aging population is becoming usual. AAL technologies are used to prevent, cure and improve the wellness and health conditions of the elderly. However, their adoption and use by older adults is still a major challenge. User Experience (UX) evaluations aim at aiding on this task, by identifying the experience that a user has while interacting with an AAL technology under particular conditions. This may help designing better products and improve user engagement and adoption of AAL solutions. However, evaluating the UX of AAL technologies is a difficult task, due to the inherent limitations of their subjects and of the evaluation methods. In this study, we validated the feasibility of assessing the UX of older adults while they use a cognitive stimulation application using a neural network trained to recognize pleasant and unpleasant emotions from electroencephalography (EEG) signals by contrasting our results with those of additional self-report and qualitative analysis UX evaluations. Our study results provide evidence about the feasibility of assessing the UX of older adults using a neural network that take as input the EEG signals; the classification accuracy of our neural network ranges from 60.87% to 82.61%. As future work we will conduct additional UX evaluation studies using the three different methods, in order to appropriately validate these results.