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Interpreting Psychophysiological States Using Unobtrusive Wearable Sensors in Virtual Reality

Authors:
Alberto Betella
Daniel Pacheco
Riccardo Zucca
Xerxes D. Arsiwalla
Pedro Omedas
Antonio Lanatà
Daniele Mazzei
Alessandro Tognetti
Alberto Greco
Nicola Carbonaro
Johannes Wagner
Florian Lingenfelser
Elisabeth André
Danilo De Rossi
Paul F.M.J. Verschure

Keywords: Affect analysis, affective states, ecological validity, EDR, HRV, wearable sensors, XIM

Abstract:
One of the main challenges in the study of human behavior is to quantitatively assess the participants’ affective states by measuring their psychophysiological signals in ecologically valid conditions. The quality of the acquired data, in fact, is often poor due to artifacts generated by natural interactions such as full body movements and gestures. We created a technology to address this problem. We enhanced the eXperience Induction Machine (XIM), an immersive space we built to conduct experiments on human behavior, with unobtrusive wearable sensors that measure electrocardiogram, breathing rate and electrodermal response. We conducted an empirical validation where participants wearing these sensors were free to move in the XIM space while exposed to a series of visual stimuli taken from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS). Our main result consists in the quantitative estimation of the arousal range of the affective stimuli through the analysis of participants’ psychophysiological states. Taken together, our findings show that the XIM constitutes a novel tool to study human behavior in life-like conditions.

Pages: 331 to 336

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2014

Publication date: March 23, 2014

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4138

ISBN: 978-1-61208-325-4

Location: Barcelona, Spain

Dates: from March 23, 2014 to March 27, 2014