Towards a Brain-Sensitive Intelligent Tutoring System: Detecting Emotions from Brainwaves

This paper proposes and evaluates a multiagents system called NORA that predicts emotional attributes from learners' brainwaves within an intelligent tutoring system. The measurements from the electrical brain activity of the learner are combined with information about the learner's emotional attributes. Electroencephalogram was used to measure brainwaves and self-reports to measure the three emotional dimensions: pleasure, arousal, and dominance, the eight emotions occurring during learning: anger, boredom, confusion, contempt curious, disgust, eureka, and frustration, and the emotional valence positive for learning and negative for learning. The system is evaluated on natural data, and it achieves an accuracy of over 63%, significantly outperforming classification using the individual modalities and several other combination schemes.