Straight from the Heart: Using Physiological Measurements in the Evaluation of Media Quality

Subjective methods are widely used to evaluate Multimedia Conferencing quality, yet when used in isolation the results can be misleading. Therefore, this research is measuring physiological indicators of stress (GSR, HR & BVP) as an indicator of the user cost of the reception quality of a multimedia conference. These measurements are taken as part of a 3-Dimensional approach, which incorporates task performance, user satisfaction and user cost. The main results have shown that subjective and physiological responses do not always correlate and that specific physiological signals respond differently depending on the degradation and task. The ability to measure stress subconsciously and unobtrusively has many potential applications.