**11. Emotions and AI**

Anxiety and emotions play a significant role in healthcare. The patients exhibit emotional reaction to the situation they are in. The suffering form pain is not equal in all and is significantly subjective. Reaction to hearing an unpleasant news like a diagnosis of cancer, prognosis of a permanent disability or even news of death have a variable emotional component. Doctors and other healthcare personnel on the other hand, are expected to provide the emotional support to the patient. An arm around the shoulders, empathy, communication, the eye contact, and the body language while sharing the unpleasant news have significant influence on the patient and the family. The patients' expectations and the helpers' perceptions influence the emotional support. The support has to be customised often. Where do the machines stand in this context [62, 63]?

The computers need to recognise and respond to the emotions and show empathy. They need to be ethical too. AI chatbots, intelligent healing platforms, therapeutic intelligence, communicative AI, emotion AI or affective AI are some of the AI tools that tend to simulate human emotions [64–70]. Software used is computer vision and natural language processing with facial recognition and voice recognition. The chatbots are becoming popular, earning the trust and engage the subjects in conversation either verbal or in the text format. While these were not rated as poor, opinion generally is in favour of a human over a machine proving the support. Simulating cultural differences in body language and communication pose problems of misinterpretation. Affective AI and Human Behaviour—Change Project (HBCP) [71, 72] deal with human behaviour. Bringing about a change in the human behaviour like mental health issues and therapy in addiction are the areas the AI is stepping into. AI and the HBCP are creating an open-access online knowledge system of behaviour change interventions. The use of natural language processing and sentiment analysis another branch of AI, has permitted interpretation of verbal communication and helped understand human expressions. Emotion and behavioural assessment is possible through the sentiment analysis [73, 74].
