Healthcare services, particularly in patient-provider interaction, often involve highly emotional situations, and it is important for physicians to understand and respond to their patients’ emotions to best ensure their well-being. In order to model the emotion domain, we have created the Visualized Emotion Ontology (VEO) to provide a semantic definition of 25 emotions based on established models, as well as visual representations of emotions utilizing shapes, lines, and colors. As determined by ontology evaluation metrics, VEO exhibited better machine-readability (z=1.12), linguistic quality (z=0.61), and domain coverage (z=0.39) compared to a sample of cognitive ontologies. Additionally, a survey of 1082 participants through Amazon Mechanical Turk revealed that a significantly higher proportion of people agree than disagree with 17 out of our 25 emotion images, validating the majority of our visualizations. From the development, evaluation, and serialization of the VEO, we have defined a set of 25 emotions using OWL that linked surveyed visualizations to each emotion. In the future, we plan to use the VEO in patient-facing software tools, such as embodied conversational agents, to enhance interactions between patients and providers in a clinical environment.
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