Determining the Psychological Involvement in Multimedia Interactions

Abstract

Human computer interaction (HCI) is currently aimed at the design of interactive computer applications for human use while preventing user frustration. When considering the nature of modern computer applications, such as e-learning systems and computer games, it appears that human involvement cannot be improved only by using traditional approaches, such as nice user interfaces. For a pleasant human involvement, these computer applications require that the computers should have the ability to naturally adapt to their users and this requires the computers to have the ability to recognize user emotions. For recognizing emotions currently most preferred research approach is aimed at facial expression based emotion recognition, which seems to have many limitations. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a method to determine the psychological involvement of a human during a multimedia interaction session using the eye movement activity and arousal evaluation. In our approach we use a low cost hardware/software combination, which determines eye movement activity based on electrooculogram (EOG) signals and the level of arousal using galvanic skin response (GSR) signals. The results obtained using six individuals show that the nature of involvement can be recognized using these affect signals as optimal levels and distracted conditions. Index Terms: Arousal, Attention, Cognition, Emotion, EOG, Eye Movement Activity, GSR, HCI, Human Involvement, Multimedia Interactions. DOI: 10.4038/icter.v2i1.1400 The International Journal on Advances in ICT for Emerging Regions 2009 02 (01): 11-20