A Wearable Head Mounted Display Bio-Signals Pad System for Emotion Recognition
Chunting Wan1,2, Dongyi Chen1, Zhiqi Huang1
1School of Automation Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China.
Sensors (Basel, Switzerland)
|January 11, 2022
Summary
This study introduces the HMD Bio Pad, a wearable device for collecting multimodal bio-signals like electroencephalography (EEG) and electrodermal activity (EDA) during virtual reality (VR) experiences. The system enables robust emotion recognition research in immersive virtual environments (IVE).
Area of Science:
- Physiological computing and affective science.
- Human-computer interaction (HCI) and virtual reality (VR) research.
Background:
- Emotion recognition research benefits from multimodal bio-signal acquisition.
- Virtual reality (VR) and immersive virtual environments (IVE) are effective for evoking emotional states.
- Existing systems for bio-signal acquisition in VR can be cumbersome.
Purpose of the Study:
- To present a novel wearable system for simultaneous multimodal bio-signal acquisition integrated with VR Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs).
- To provide researchers with a user-friendly human-computer interaction (HCI) interface for emotion recognition studies in VR.
- To validate the quality and performance of the acquired bio-signals (EEG, EDA, PPG, SKT).
Main Methods:
- Development of the HMD Bio Pad, a wearable device for forehead bio-signal acquisition (EEG, EDA, PPG, SKT) attached to HMDs.
- Creation of an HCI interface for stimulus presentation and data recording within VR environments.
- Validation experiments including EEG eye-blink and eyes-open/closed tasks, EDA signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and skin conductance response (SCR) analysis, skin temperature (SKT) response to emotion, and photoplethysmograph (PPG) pulse rate (PR) accuracy.
Main Results:
- The HMD Bio Pad demonstrated comparable EEG signal quality to dedicated devices and successfully recorded alpha rhythm.
- Acquired electrodermal activity (EDA) signals exhibited a high mean SNR of 28.52 dB, with relevant skin conductance response (SCR) extracted.
- Skin temperature (SKT) acquisition effectively captured responses to unpleasant emotions, and photoplethysmograph (PPG) estimated pulse rate (PR) with low average absolute error (AAE) of 1.12 BPM.
Conclusions:
- The HMD Bio Pad is a portable, comfortable, and easy-to-wear solution for multimodal bio-signal recording in VR.
- The proposed system effectively supports emotion recognition research by providing high-quality physiological data within immersive virtual environments.
- This integrated system has the potential to advance research in affective computing and VR-based psychological studies.
