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Daniel J. McDuff, Javier Hernandez, Sarah Gontarek, and Rosalind W. Picard. 2016. COGCAM: Contact-free Measurement of Cognitive Stress During Computer Tasks with a Digital Camera. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '16). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 4000–4004. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858247
Contact-free camera-based measurement of cognitive stress opens up new possibilities for human-computer interaction with applications in remote learning, stress monitoring, and optimization of workload for user experience. The autonomic nervous system controls the inter-beat intervals of the heart and breathing patterns, and these signals change under cognitive stress. We built a participant-independent cognitive stress recognition model based on photoplethysmographic signals measured remotely at a distance of 3 meters. We tested the model on naturalistic responses from 10 individuals completing randomized-order computer-based tasks (ball control and card sorting). The system successfully detected increased stress during the tasks, which were consistent with self-report measures. Changes in heart rate variability were more discriminative indicators of cognitive stress than were heart rate and breathing rate.