Emotional arousal estimation while reading comics based on physiological signal analysis

Abstract

Estimating emotions while reading enables new services such as comic recommendation. Most of existing emotion estima- tion systems employ bulky devices. Furthermore, few ap- plications have been developed for analyzing the emotions while reading. The purpose of our research is to develop a method for estimating emotions while reading. As the tar- get of reading, we select comics, which stimulate emotions often more than other types of documents. As we want our system to be easily usable, we selected sensors embedded in a wristband and an eye tracker. Emotions can be described by two dimensions called emotional valence and arousal. As a first step, we propose in this paper to estimate the emo- tional arousal. We analyze the electrodermal activity, blood volume pulse, heart rate, skin temperature and pupil diam- eter of a subject to estimate if the reader feels a high or low arousal while reading. Our experiment shows that for some participants, the arousal can be estimated accurately.