Wearable ECG for Tension Assessment in Movie Watching and Adventure Riding

Abstract

The traditional electrocardiograph (ECG) is used to record heart activity under the supervision of doctors or well-trained medical personnel in the hospital or clinic. However, due to the advances in the MEMS technology in recent years, wearable ECG sensors are developed to collect ECG signals in daily life. The ECG signals can reveal the activity of the autonomic nervous system (ANS). The fluctuations in emotion may cause the enhancement of ANS, and further cause the rising of the heart rate. Hence, by investigating the heart rate data, we may understand how human emotion is affected by the outside environments or events. In this work, we measure the heart rate in two activities, including movie watching and adventure riding, which may cause people excited and nervous. The correlation between the heart rate and the activities are investigated. We propose to assess the exciting level of the activities via the heart rate data. We develop an algorithm to mark the exciting segments, and design questionnaires to understand how people feel in the activities. The experiment results show that the heart rate and the exciting level are positively correlated, and the exciting segments marked by the proposed algorithm are coincident with the answers from the questionnaires.