Title
A comparison between laboratory and wearable sensors in the context of physiological synchrony
Author
van Beers, J.J.
Stuldreher, I.V.
Thammasan, N.
Brouwer, A.M.
Contributor
Truong, K. (editor)
Heylen, D. (editor)
Czerwinski, M. (editor)
Publication year
2020
Abstract
Measuring concurrent changes in autonomic physiological responses aggregated across individuals (Physiological Synchrony - PS) can provide insight into group-level cognitive or emotional processes. Utilizing cheap and easy-to-use wearable sensors to measure physiology rather than their high-end laboratory counterparts is desirable. Since it is currently ambiguous how different signal properties (arising from different types of measuring equipment) influence the detection of PS associated with mental processes, it is unclear whether, or to what extent, PS based on data from wearables compares to that from their laboratory equivalents. Existing literature has investigated PS using both types of equipment, but none compared them directly. In this study, we measure PS in electrodermal activity (EDA) and inter-beat interval (IBI, inverse of heart rate) of participants who listened to the same audio stream but were either instructed to attend to the presented narrative (n=13) or to the interspersed auditory events (n=13). Both laboratory and wearable sensors were used (ActiveTwo electrocardiogram (ECG) and EDA; Wahoo Tickr and EdaMove4). A participant's attentional condition was classified based on which attentional group they shared greater synchrony with. For both types of sensors, we found classification accuracies of 73% or higher in both EDA and IBI. We found no significant difference in classification accuracies between the laboratory and wearable sensors. These findings encourage the use of wearables for PS based research and for in-the-field measurements.
Subject
Auditory
Autonomic physiology
Group
Physiological synchrony
Selective attention
Wearable sensors
To reference this document use:
http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:664935f2-5d18-462e-bc06-e73c734bc8de
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1145/3382507.3418837
TNO identifier
946735
ISSN
9781-4503
Source
ICMI '20 Companion: Companion Publication of the 2020 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, virtual 25-29 October 2020, the Netherlands, 604-608
Document type
conference paper