Classification of Individuals Based on Autonomic Response to Virtual Gaming

Abstract

Modern games consists of digital gaming consoles that involves interaction with a user and has an interface to generate visual feedback through 2D/3D monitor. These games have several psychological side effects like loss of spatial awareness, back pains, insomnia, addiction, aggression, stress, and hypertension. Virtual reality (VR) Gaming is one of the most emerging and novel technologies in the field of entertainment. Evaluation of this new technology has become important in order to analyze the effects of its predecessors (2D and 3D gaming). The main focus of this paper is on detection of stress levels in individuals due to VR gaming and classify them depending on their sympathetic and parasympathetic dominance. This is done through acquisition of electrocardiogram (ECG) and photo plethysmograph signals (PPG) signals and extracting their time domain and frequency domain features before, during and after gaming (Fatma Uysal and Mahmut Tokmakçi, 2018. Evaluation of stress parameters based on heart rate variability measurement. Department of Biomedical Engineering, Erciyes University, Kayseri, Turkey. fatmauysal@erciyes.edu.tr, tokmakci@erciyes.edu.tr., da Silva1, A.G.C.B., Arauj, D.N., et al, 2018. Increase in perceived stress is correlated to lower heart rate variability in healthy young subjects. Departamento de Fisioterapia, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Natal, Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil. s/n., 81531–980, Curitiba, Parana, Brazil. E-mail: fernandoaldias@gmail.com.). The physiological signal variation is analyzed by performing Heart Rate Variability (HRV) analysis over ECG signals which is one of the fast emerging methods in non-invasive research and clinical tools for assessing autonomic nervous system function (Juan Sztajzel, 2004. Heart rate variability: Aa non-invasive electrocardiographic method to measure the autonomic nervous system. Cardiology Center and Medical Policlinics, University Hospital, Geneva, Switzerland, SWISS MED WKLY 2004;134:514–522. www.smw.ch). Pulse-transmissiontime-variability (PTTV), which is extracted, has high coherence with heart rate variability and is also used as an objective measure of stress. In this paper we obtain the response of an individual during VR gaming and correlate them with the HRV/PTT parameters. The game chosen for the data acquisition was ‘VR city view rope crossing-360 android VR,’ during which data recording is done. It was found that there was a quantitative increase in physiological stress when individuals were exposed to virtual high heights in comparison with time relative to unaltered viewing. Mean Heart rate showed a significant increase during gaming for both boys and girls which indicates that the body is under the influence of a sympathetic activity like a physical exercise.