Affective Internet of Things: Mimicking human-like personality in designing smart-objects

The paper wants to introduce the concept of Affective Internet of Things (AIoT) where smart objects are empowered with affective capability in terms of abstraction of their emotional state. Moreover each smart object can be associated with a specific 'personality'. This approach, already used in the field of social robotics, mainly exploits robots' appearance (i.e. anthropomorphism or zoomorphism). The research aims at extending such a paradigm to everyday-life objects in order to 'warm-up' the empathic connections that humans generally establish with 'cold' gadgets and devices. A new framework for the Affective IoT has been developed: EMPATI (EMPATI Mimics Personalities on Affective Things on Internet). It provides models and functions to simulate different personality for affective objects living in both virtual and real world. Finally, a set of experiments has been conceived to assess the key aspects of the framework in terms of capability to simulate emotional responses depending on the object interaction with the environment and the affective stimuli.