Classification of pleasantness of wind by electroencephalography

Abstract

Thermal comfort of humans depends on the surrounding environment and affects their productivity. Several environmental factors, such as air temperature, relative humidity, wind or airflow, and radiation, have considerable influence on the thermal comfort or pleasantness; hence, these are generally controlled by electrical devices. Lately, the development of objective measurement methods for thermal comfort or pleasantness using physiological signals is receiving attention to realize a personalized comfortable environment through the automatic control of electrical devices. In this study, we focused on electroencephalography (EEG) and investigated whether EEG signals contain information related to the pleasantness of ambient airflow reproducing natural wind fluctuations using machine learning methods. In a hot and humid artificial climate chamber, we measured EEG signals while the participants were exposed to airflow at four different velocities. Based on the reported pleasantness levels, we performed within-participant classification from the source activity of the EEG and obtained a classification accuracy higher than the chance level using both linear and nonlinear support vector machine classifiers as well as an artificial neural network. The results of this study showed that EEG is useful in identifying people’s transient pleasantness when exposed to wind.