Human Factors Analysis Using Wearable Sensors in the Context of Cognitive and Emotional Arousal

Quantitative investigations on stress conditions in evaluation scenarios have so far mainly been conducted in static scenarios, such as, in desktop studies. Studies involving the mobility of participants are rather rare, in particular, considering substantial comparison between different stress conditions. Recently, data and eye tracking glasses have shifted the attention on future applications classes that would require wearable devices delivering multisensory, including psychophysiological, data in various everyday contexts, requiring information about the psychological status of the user. These settings need to investigate stress conditions in different mobile settings, querying which parameters would provide discriminative features for stress indication. A study with 20 participants was conducted in a shopping and a navigation context, involving participants – being equipped with portable psychophysiological sensors and eye tracking glasses - in memory and orientation tasks, respectively, for the inducing of cognitive and emotional arousal. From the results we conclude that the specific context and the cause of arousal lead to different reactions of the psychophysiological system as well as in the eye movement behavior. Depending on the context and the stress condition under investigation, different arousal, and consequently, stress classifiers as well as attention models should be applied.