Emotion-Board

Type: Semester Thesis
Student: Marcel Bächler
Advisor: Johannes Schumm, Andreas Bulling
Project: SEAT

In the context of the SEAT project (Smart tEchnologies for stress free Air Travel) the Wearable Computing Lab designs a body/seat based multi-sensor network with the capability of detecting physiological and psychological changes of flight passenger's condition in real time. For this project, electrodermal activity (EDA) is used to detect emotions like stress, fear of flying or discomfort.

The goal of this semester thesis was to design and produce a wearable device for measuring the EDA. The electrical conductance of a person's skin is directly correlated to their emotional state. The developed Emotion-Board is able to record the skin conductance between two fingers. As the electrodermal activity is measured at the fingers, motion artifacts can easily occur and decrease the signal quality. In order to deal with motion artifacts “intelligent finger-electrodes” were designed to measure the movements of the fingers simultaneously. This offers the possibility to compensate these artifacts. Additionally, a temperature and humidity sensor on the board makes a detection of temperature and humidity artifacts possible. The measured data can be sent permanently via Bluetooth to a linux system. The captured signal curves can be displayed in Matlab for visualization, interpretation and further processing. The proper functionality of the Emotion-board was verified in several experiments and measurements.