my team and i are very happy to share news of our third publication in the field of the Science of Learning, with specific reference to neuroergonomics :-) following our first and second publications, our paper is published in the section on Biosignal Processing in the journal Bioengineering, in a special issue themed on 'Electronic Wearable Solutions for Sport and Health'.
since April 2021, we have been working hard on Learning at the intersection of AI, physiology, EEG, our environment and well-being (the Life2Well Project), in which we aim to afford learners opportunities to learn about their own learning, while they are learning, from a citizen science perspective.
with the help of Assistant Professor Posada-Quintero in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Connecticut, we report our work in Volume 11 Issue 3 of the journal, as Application of DIY Electrodermal Activity wristband in detecting stress and affective responses of students.
the abstract of our paper reads:
This paper describes the analysis of electrodermal activity (EDA) in the context of students’ scholastic activity. Taking a multidisciplinary, citizen science and maker-centric approach, low-cost, bespoken wearables, such as a mini weather station and biometric wristband, were built. To investigate both physical health as well as stress, the instruments were first validated against research grade devices. Following this, a research experiment was created and conducted in the context of students’ scholastic activity. Data from this experiment were used to train machine learning models, which were then applied to interpret the relationships between the environment, health, and stress. It is hoped that analyses of EDA data will further strengthen the emerging model describing the intersections between local microclimate and physiological and neurological stress. The results suggest that temperature and air quality play an important role in students’ physiological well-being, thus demonstrating the feasibility of understanding the extent of the effects of various microclimatic factors. This highlights the importance of thermal comfort and air ventilation in real-life applications to improve students’ well-being. We envision our work making a significant impact by showcasing the effectiveness and feasibility of inexpensive, self-designed wearable devices for tracking microclimate and electrodermal activity (EDA). The affordability of these wearables holds promising implications for scalability and encourages crowd-sourced citizen science in the relatively unexplored domain of microclimate’s influence on well-being. Embracing citizen science can then democratize learning and expedite rapid research advancements.