Building a Low-Cost Wireless Biofeedback Solution: Applying Design Science Research Methodology.

In recent years, affective computing has emerged as a promising approach to studying user experience, replacing subjective methods that rely on participants' self-evaluation. Affective computing uses biometrics to recognize people's emotional states as they interact with a product. However, the cost of medical-grade biofeedback systems is prohibitive for researchers with limited budgets. An alternative solution is to use consumer-grade devices, which are more affordable. However, these devices require proprietary software to collect data, complicating data processing, synchronization, and integration. Additionally, researchers need multiple computers to control the biofeedback system, increasing equipment costs and complexity. To address these challenges, we developed a low-cost biofeedback platform using inexpensive hardware and open-source libraries. Our software can serve as a system development kit for future studies. We conducted a simple experiment with one participant to validate the platform's effectiveness, using one baseline and two tasks that elicited distinct responses. Our low-cost biofeedback platform provides a reference architecture for researchers with limited budgets who wish to incorporate biometrics into their studies. This platform can be used to develop affective computing models in various domains, including ergonomics, human factors engineering, user experience, human behavioral studies, and human-robot interaction.

Training Performance of Laparoscopic Surgery in Two- and Three-Dimensional Displays.

INTRODUCTION: This research investigated differences in the effects of a state-of-art stereoscopic 3-dimensional (3D) display and a traditional 2-dimensional (2D) display in simulated laparoscopic surgery over a longer duration than in previous publications and studied the learning effects of the 2 display systems on novices. METHODS: A randomized experiment with 2 factors, image dimensions and image sequence, was conducted to investigate differences in the mean movement time, the mean error frequency, NASA-TLX cognitive workload, and visual fatigue in pegboard and circle-tracing tasks. RESULTS: The stereoscopic 3D display had advantages in mean movement time ( P < .001 and P = .002) and mean error frequency ( P = .010 and P = .008) in both the tasks. There were no significant differences in the objective visual fatigue ( P = .729 and P = .422) and in the NASA-TLX ( P = .605 and P = .937) cognitive workload between the 3D and the 2D displays on both the tasks. For the learning effect, participants who used the stereoscopic 3D display first had shorter mean movement time in the 2D display environment on both the pegboard ( P = .011) and the circle-tracing ( P = .017) tasks. CONCLUSIONS: The results of this research suggest that a stereoscopic system would not result in higher objective visual fatigue and cognitive workload than a 2D system, and it might reduce the performance time and increase the precision of surgical operations. In addition, learning efficiency of the stereoscopic system on the novices in this study demonstrated its value for training and education in laparoscopic surgery.

Lifting speed preferences and their effects on the maximal lifting capacity.

The objectives of this study were to evaluate how lifting capacity and subjective preferences are affected by different lifting speeds. The maximum lifting capacity of lift was determined with three independent variables, lifting speed, lifting technique, and lifting height. Questionnaires were evaluated after the experiment by the participants for the lifting speed preferences. This study found that the lifting speed was a significant factor in the lifting capacity (p<0.001); and the lifting height (p<0.001) and the interaction of lifting speed and lifting height (p=0.005) affected the lifting capacity significantly. The maximal lifting capacity was achieved around the optimal speed that was neither too fast nor too slow. Moreover, the participants' preferred lifting speeds were consistently close to the optimal lifting speed. The results showed that the common lifting practice guideline to lift slowly might make the worker unable to generate a large lifting capacity.