The growth of health, wellbeing, activity monitoring and social computing continues to fuel developments in technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), wearable devices, sensors, actuators, mobile communication together with distributed management and information retrieval infrastructures. Through these technology mediums more user centred data can now be captured, monitored, stored and analysed to create ambient personalisation and contextualisation of services tailored to individual needs. To extend these capabilities there is a need to incorporate and utilize physiological information (e.g., as in computer-human interaction, health and fitness monitoring) together with the recognition, interpretation, processing, and modelling of human affective states in order to further enhance applications with human-like intelligence and responsiveness.

Practical applications of Affective and Physiological Computing (APC) based systems seek to enhance user context and sensitivity by monitoring, recognising and acting on our emotional states and physiological signals. Integrating these sensing modalities into intelligent and pervasive computing systems raises many new challenges for signal processing and modelling of complex high dimensional data sources such as: body signals (e.g., heart rate, brain waves, skin conductance and respiration) facial features, speech and human kinematics which also can be very noisy/uncertain and subject-dependent.

The Physiological and Affective Computing for Human Centred Systems special session is also organised through the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society's Emerging Technologies Task Force on Affective Computing. This special session aims to bring together researchers to discuss how CI techniques can be used to help solve challenging APC problems and conversely, how interpreting and modelling physiological and affect (emotion) data can inspire new approaches in CI and its applications in human centred technologies.