Abstract
One solution supporting a healthy mental state for humans is controlling the environment with ambient intelligence technology. We are developing a mental support system for healthy people that automatically changes environmental conditions, such as sound volume and light color, depending on the user’s mental state, which is monitored according to physiological signals such as sympathetic nerve activity. In our previous basic study under laboratory-controlled conditions, the system was applied to improve the user’s concentration level as they performed calculation tasks. Results indicated that the system improved the task performance, but individual variations existed, with some users improving greatly but others much less. For the future practical application of the system, determining the causes of the variation in efficacy is important. Considering that the brain structure and activity differ according to an individual’s personality, we investigated the relationship between the user’s personality and task performance with our system’s support. The results showed a clear correlation between the extraversion score and task performance. Our study presents an example where the system’s efficacy is sensitive to the user’s personality and indicates the importance of considering the user’s personality when designing a mental support system based on ambient intelligence.
Highlights
Maintaining mental well-being is important, especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic that has forced urgent changes in our life and work styles
Our previous study showed that the task performance statistically improved under the With ambient intelligence (AmI) condition (Iwashita and Ishikawa, 2021), but individual differences were observed in the level of improvement
The linear mixed-effects model indicated that neuroticism had insignificant statistical effect on task performance [condition: degree of freedom 2, chi-square 0.9, p-value 0.89930; neuroticism-score: df 1, chi-square 0.1, p-value 0.69860; FIGURE 3 | Example of a participant’s time courses for the nasal skin temperature, environmental manipulations, and task performance. (A–C) Time courses for the nasal skin temperature and environmental manipulations of the sound volume, aroma intensity, and light color under three conditions (User, With Random, and With AmI). (D–F) Time courses for the task performances according to the points scored in each countdown 25 square (C25S) game
Summary
Maintaining mental well-being is important, especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic that has forced urgent changes in our life and work styles. Different methods and technologies have been studied to improve the mental state. These are not always universally effective and have different efficacies depending on the individual. The user’s personality plays an important role in accepting socially assistive robotics (SAR) for mental therapy and therapeutic performance (Tapus and Mataric, 2008). SAR affects the user’s mental state through multimodal cues to express empathy, including verbal and nonverbal (body movement) interactions as well as social distance. A social relationship between the robot and user can determine the success of SAR; user’s and robot’s personalities are considered important for further developing effective SAR (Esterwood and Robert, 2020)
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