Investigating the effects of using biofeedback as visual stress indicator during video-mediated collaboration

Abstract

During remote video-mediated assistance, instructors often guide workers through problems and instruct them to perform unfamiliar or complex operations. However, the workers' performance might deteriorate due to stress. We argue that informing biofeedback to the instructor, can improve communication and lead to lower stress. This paper presents a thorough investigation on mental workload and stress perceived by twenty participants, paired up in an instructor-worker scenario, performing remote video-mediated tasks. The interface conditions differ in task, facial and biofeedback communication. Two self-report measures are used to assess mental workload and stress. Results show that pairs reported lower mental workload and stress when instructors are using the biofeedback as compared to using interfaces with facial view. Significant correlations were found on task performance with reducing stress (i.e. increased task engagement and decreased worry) for instructors and declining mental workload (i.e. increased performance) for workers. Our findings provide insights to advance video-mediated interfaces for remote collaborative work.

Measuring Photoplethysmogram-Based Stress-Induced Vascular Response Index to Assess Cognitive Load and Stress

“…The effectiveness of EDA has been demonstrated in previous studies [3,7,14]. However, EDA may have notable individual differences and is susceptible to the influence from skin conditions as well as ambient temperature and humidity.…”

“…For example, Brouwer et al [3] used EEG, HRV, respiration, skin conductance, pupil size and eye blink to study the mental effects induced by task difficulties, and found different sensitivities and reliabilities among the measures. Tan et al proposed a smart videomedicated collaboration system with the user's mental feedback indicated by electrodermal activity (EDA), blood pressure and respiration [7]. Hjortskov et al [20] also compared the performance of HRV and blood pressure on the effect of mental stress.…”

“…Assessing the cognitive load that a particular system or task imposes on users is very important in human-computer interaction (HCI) design, as the information on cognitive load can be used to improve these systems [2]. Dynamic and real-time assessment of cognitive load is particularly useful for capturing the detailed changes subjects undergo during a task, which supports a precise analysis as well as improvement on design components [2][3][4] and the collection of continuous psychophysiological data for smart HCI applications [5][6][7].…”

Finding Significant Stress Episodes in a Discontinuous Time Series of Rapidly Varying Mobile Sensor Data

“…The second category of works are those that assess interruptibility, workload, or availability to decide when to deliver a prompt for intervention, self-report, or phone call [22, 35, 36, 62]. A recent work [58] proposed a model that uses stress, time, location, and the current context to determine the availability or interruptibility of users, in their natural environment, to respond to randomly triggered self-report prompts.…”

Augmenting Social Interactions

“…A number of systems that aimed to give feedback on communicative behaviours made use of mobile phones, for example, to support communication in face-to-face conversation [22], group meetings [21], during public speeches [31] or to help children with language delay [20]. Social augmentation techniques have also been explored in video conferencing settings [35] using normal desktop monitors. We decided to make use of head-mounted displays which bear the advantage that they do not require speakers to switch back and forth between the device and the interlocutor(s).…”