It has long been established that the pupil diameter increases during mental activities in proportion to the difficulty of the task at hand. However, it is still unclear whether this relationship between the pupil size and effort applies also to physical effort. In order to address this issue, we asked healthy volunteers to perform a power grip task, at varied intensity, while evaluating their ...

Mental and physical efforts, such as paying attention and lifting weights, have been shown to involve different brain systems. These cognitive and motor systems, respectively, include cortical networks (prefronto-parietal and precentral regions) as well as subregions of the dorsal basal ganglia (caudate and putamen). Both systems appeared sensitive to incentive motivation: their activity increa...

This paper deals with the problem of estimating the effort required to maintain a static pose by human beings. The problem is important in developing dance summarization and rehabilitation applications. We estimate the human pose effort using two kinds of body constraints – skeletal constraints and gravitational constraints. The extracted features are combined together using SVM regression to e...