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© 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.

Abstract

Several unobtrusive sensors have been tested in studies to capture physiological reactions to stress in workplace settings. Lab studies tend to focus on assessing sensors during a specific computer task, while in situ studies tend to offer a generalized view of sensors’ efficacy for workplace stress monitoring, without discriminating different tasks. Given the variation in workplace computer activities, this study investigates the efficacy of unobtrusive sensors for stress measurement across a variety of tasks. We present a comparison of five physiological measurements obtained in a lab experiment, where participants completed six different computer tasks, while we measured their stress levels using a chest-band (ECG, respiration), a wristband (PPG and EDA), and an emerging thermal imaging method (perinasal perspiration). We found that thermal imaging can detect increased stress for most participants across all tasks, while wrist and chest sensors were less generalizable across tasks and participants. We summarize the costs and benefits of each sensor stream, and show how some computer use scenarios present usability and reliability challenges for stress monitoring with certain physiological sensors. We provide recommendations for researchers and system builders for measuring stress with physiological sensors during workplace computer use.

Details

Title
An Empirical Study Comparing Unobtrusive Physiological Sensors for Stress Detection in Computer Work
Author
Akbar, Fatema 1   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Mark, Gloria 1 ; Pavlidis, Ioannis 2 ; Gutierrez-Osuna, Ricardo 3 

 Department of Informatics, University of California, Irvine, CA 92617, USA 
 Computational Physiology Laboratory, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77004, USA 
 Perception, Sensing, and Instrumentation Laboratory, Texas AM University, College Station, TX 77843, USA 
First page
3766
Publication year
2019
Publication date
2019
Publisher
MDPI AG
e-ISSN
14248220
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
2301788734
Copyright
© 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.