Can AI detect pain and express pain empathy? A review from emotion recognition and a human-centered AI perspective
Sensory and emotional experiences such as pain and empathy are essential for mental and physical
health. Cognitive neuroscience has been working on revealing mechanisms underlying pain and
empathy. Furthermore, as trending research areas, computational pain recognition and empathic
artificial intelligence (AI) show progress and promise for healthcare or human-computer interaction.
Although AI research has recently made it increasingly possible to create artificial systems with
affective processing, most cognitive neuroscience and AI research do not jointly address the issues of
empathy in AI and cognitive neuroscience. The main aim of this paper is to introduce key advances,
cognitive challenges and technical barriers in computational pain recognition and the implementation
of artificial empathy. Our discussion covers the following topics: How can AI recognize pain from
unimodal and multimodal information? Is it crucial for AI to be empathic? What are the benefits and
challenges of empathic AI? Despite some consensus on the importance of AI, including empathic
recognition and responses, we also highlight future challenges for artificial empathy and possible paths
from interdisciplinary perspectives. Furthermore, we discuss challenges for responsible evaluation of
cognitive methods and computational techniques and show approaches to future work to contribute to
affective assistants capable of empathy.
@Article{CFYWLW21, author = {Cao, Siqi and Fu, Di and Yang, Xu and Wermter, Stefan and Liu, Xun and Wu, Haiyan}, title = {Can AI detect pain and express pain empathy? A review from emotion recognition and a human-centered AI perspective}, journal = {arXiv: 2110.04249}, number = {}, volume = {}, pages = {}, year = {2021}, month = {Oct}, publisher = {}, doi = {}, }