Investigation of human affect during electronic commerce activities

With the development of e-commerce an ever increasing number of customers shop online, interacting with their personal computers more often and for longer than with human clerks. However a major limitation of today's technology is that machines do not have the means of observing and interpreting the user's response to the service provided. We are interested here in one particular type of response, the emotional response of the user. This paper presents an evaluation of the use of skin conductance measurements for this purpose, using a wearable sensing device called AffectiveWare. The investigation was carried out as part of a joint project between the London Science Museum's Live Science program, and Imperial College London. The aim is to discover more about the role of affect in our interaction with computers.