Gustav: Cross-device Cross-computer Synchronization of Sensory Signals

Abstract

Temporal synchronization of behavioral and physiological signals collected through different devices (and sometimes through different computers) is a longstanding challenge in HCI, neuroscience, psychology, and related areas. Previous research has proposed to synchronize sensory signals using (1) dedicated hardware; (2) dedicated software; or (3) alignment algorithms. All these approaches are either vendor-locked, non-generalizable, or difficult to adopt in practice. We propose a simple but highly efficient alternative: instrument the stimulus presentation software by injecting supervisory event-related timestamps, followed by a post-processing step over the recorded log files. Armed with this information, we introduce Gustav, our approach to orchestrate the recording of sensory signals across devices and computers. Gustav ensures that all signals coincide exactly with the duration of each experiment condition, with millisecond precision. Gustav is publicly available as open source software. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Laboratory experiments; Interaction devices; HCI design and evaluation methods.