Emotion-Aware Smart Home Automation Based on the eBICA Model
For smart home users, this work provides empirical evidence that emotion-based automation can enhance psychological safety, but it is an early-stage proof-of-concept with limited scope.
The study proposes an emotion-aware smart home automation framework based on the eBICA model and demonstrates, via a proof-of-concept experiment, that it significantly reduces state anxiety (STAI-S) after an anxiety-inducing event, with personality traits modulating the effect.
Smart home automation that adapts to a user's emotional state can enhance psychological safety in daily living environments. This study proposes an emotion-aware automation framework guided by the emotional Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architecture (eBICA), which integrates appraisal, somatic responses, and behavior selection. We conducted a proof-of-concept experiment in a pseudo-smart-home environment, where participants were exposed to an anxiety-inducing event followed by a comfort-inducing automation. State anxiety (STAI-S) was measured throughout the task sequence. The results showed a significant reduction in STAI-S immediately after introducing the avoidance automation, demonstrating that emotion-based control can effectively promote psychological safety. Furthermore, an analysis of individual characteristics suggested that personality and anxiety-related traits modulate the degree of relief, indicating the potential for personalized emotion-adaptive automation. Overall, this study provides empirical evidence that eBICA-based emotional control can function effectively in smart home environments and offers a foundation for next-generation affective home automation systems.