Workshop:
Embodied Intelligence for Emotion and Stress
Regulation in Pervasive Health
Emotional well-being is central to health, yet pervasive health technologies have predominantly focused on physical monitoring, leaving emotion regulation underexplored. Embodied intelligence systems — robots, tangibles, and interactive everyday objects enhanced with robotic capabilities — offer a promising avenue for supporting emotion regulation in naturalistic, pervasive settings. They engage users across multiple sensory modalities and can operate continuously in home, therapeutic, and educational environments.
However, key challenges remain: How should embodied intelligence systems be designed to sustain effective emotion regulation over time? How do we ensure ethical, privacy-respecting pervasive deployment? How can these technologies serve diverse and vulnerable populations?
This half-day workshop brings together researchers and practitioners from design, robotics, affective computing, psychology, and pervasive health to collectively map the design space, share empirical evidence, identify open challenges, and chart a community research agenda.
Scope and Topics
This workshop addresses the design, evaluation, and deployment of embodied intelligence systems for emotion regulation in pervasive health settings. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Design of embodied intelligence systems: appearance, interaction, and behavioral design for emotion regulation
- Pervasive sensing and emotion recognition: physiological signals, multimodal inputs, context awareness
- Long-term engagement and sustained effectiveness of embodied intelligence systems in home or clinical settings
- Application scenarios: stress and anxiety management, loneliness and depression support, positive mood induction
- Target populations: children, neuro-atypical individuals (ASD, ADHD, cerebral palsy), older adults, people with dementia, and other vulnerable groups
- Biofeedback integration: physiological sensing and real-time adaptive feedback in embodied systems
- Human–robot interaction in healthcare: safety, trust, and relational aspects
- Ethics, privacy, and data security in pervasive emotion regulation systems
- Evaluation methods: RCTs, field studies, laboratory experiments, qualitative and mixed methods
- Social and co-regulation: involving caregivers, family members, and peer support through embodied technology
Timeline
Paper Submission deadline: 30 June, 2026
Notification deadline: 20 July, 2026
Camera-ready deadline: 30 July, 2026
Paper Submission
The workshop accepts position papers of 4+ pages including references.
Registered and presented workshop papers will be submitted for publication as a part of the EAI PervasiveHealth 2026 Conference Proceedings in a non-indexed Annex section.
Publication
All registered papers will be submitted for publishing by Springer and made available through SpringerLink Digital Library.
PervasiveHealth proceedings are indexed in leading indexing services, such as Web of Science, Compendex, Scopus, DBLP, EU Digital Library, Google Scholar, IO-Port, MathSciNet, Inspec, and Zentralblatt MATH.
Submission Guidelines
The papers should be written in English and should be 6-11 pages in length.
Previously published work may not be submitted, nor may the work be concurrently submitted to any other conference or journal. Such papers will be rejected without review.
The paper submissions must follow the Springer formatting guidelines (see Author’s kit).
Read the Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement.
Workshop Organizers
Jing Li
Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands
Jing Li is a PhD candidate in the Industrial Design faculty of Eindhoven University of Technology (https://www.jinglihub.com/). Her research focuses on designing connected robotic systems for stress management in children with ASD, leveraging embodied biofeedback, the Internet of Robotic Things, and human–robot interaction. She has organised the predecessor of this workshop at RO-MAN 2024 and co-authored a systematic review of embodied technologies for stress management in children.
Emilia Barakova
Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands
Emilia Barakova is Assistant Professor of Socially Intelligent Systems and head of the Social Robotics Lab at Eindhoven University of Technology. She is an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Social Robotics and Journal of Integrative Neuroscience. Her expertise spans embodied social interaction, cognitive and brain-inspired robotics, and designing technologies for individuals with special needs (ASD, dementia). She has coordinated multiple EU research projects in these areas and brings deep experience in running interdisciplinary workshops on social robotics and well-being.
Jun Hu
Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands
Jun Hu is an Associate Professor in Design Research on Social Computing at the Department of Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology (https://www.tue.nl/en/research/researchers/jun-hu). He is a Distinguished Adjunct Professor at Jiangnan University and a Guest Professor at Zhejiang University. With over 320 peer-reviewed publications and an H-index of 35 in HCI, IoT, AI, industrial design, and design education, he brings broad expertise in designing embodied interactive technologies and biofeedback systems for stress intervention. He is the coordinator of the TU/e DESIS Lab and chair of the IFIP TC14 working group on Art and Entertainment.
Jin Huang
University of Cambridge, UK
Jin Huang is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge (https://www.cst.cam.ac.uk/people/jh2642). She works in the Affective Intelligence and Robotics Laboratory (AFAR), led by Prof. Hatice Gunes, exploring how conversational AI agents can enhance social robots and how human–robot interaction can inform the design of more adaptive and trustworthy AI conversational systems. Her research bridges multimodality, embodiment, and trust, making her a key contributor to the workshop’s focus on affective and conversational dimensions of embodied intelligence.
