ABSTRACT
: The pairing of Virtual Reality technology with Physiological Sensing
has gained much interest in clinical settings and beyond: from
developing novel methods for diagnosis of perception and cognition
impairments, biofeedback for anxiety treatment, to enhancing
everyday practices such as self-guided meditation. However, conducting
this type of research does not come without challenges. For
example, accessing the equipment for recording data from the user,
synchronizing physiological response data with the stimuli or interactive
environment is not trivial and generating virtual content in
response to the user’s real-time data is costly and complex. This
paper presents Galea, a device for multi-modal signal acquisition
able to measure the physiological response of a user when experiencing
virtual content, enabling behavioral, affective computing, and
human-computer interaction research and applications to access data
from the Parasympathetic nervous system and Sympathetic nervous
system simultaneously. We present a primer on detectable human
physiology as an input source for Physiological Computing from the
perspective of the signals available through our device. We describe
the primary design considerations and circuit characterization results
of in-vivo recordings from the wearer’s brain, eyes, heart, skin, and
muscles. We also present an example to help contextualize how
these signals can be used in a virtual reality setting. Galea makes
working with physiological sensors in virtual reality more accessible
and can offer a standard for inter and intra experiment data comparisons.
Lastly, we discuss the importance and contributions of this
work as well as future challenges that need to be considered.
