Nose Heat: Exploring Stress-induced Nasal Thermal Variability through Mobile Thermal Imaging

Abstract

Automatically monitoring and quantifying stress-induced thermal dynamic information in real-world settings is an extremely important but challenging problem. In this paper, we explore whether we can use mobile thermal imaging to measure the rich physiological cues of mental stress that can be deduced from a person's nose temperature. To answer this question we build i) a framework for monitoring nasal thermal variable patterns continuously and ii) a novel set of thermal variability metrics to capture a richness of the dynamic information. We evaluated our approach in a series of studies including laboratory-based psychosocial stress-induction tasks and real-world factory settings. We demonstrate our approach has the potential for assessing stress responses beyond controlled laboratory settings.