Can Infrared Facial Thermography Disclose Mental Workload in Indoor Thermal Environments?
Can Infrared Facial Thermography Disclose Mental Workload in Indoor Thermal Environments?
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DOI：
10.1145/3363459.3363528
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发表时间：
2019-11
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Xi Wang;Da Li;C. Menassa;V. Kamat
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Xi Wang;Da Li;C. Menassa;V. Kamat
脑力劳动代表了一个人投入到一项任务中的脑力资源。在建筑环境中，了解环境热状况如何影响居住者的心理工作负荷为实现采暖、通风和空调(HVAC)系统的最佳热设置提供了机会。然而，在大范围和连续的范围内直接测量精神负荷需要乘员进行主观测试或佩戴脑电(EEG)或类似设备，这是不切实际的。本文评估了使用低成本热像仪拍摄的红外面部热像来揭示脑力负荷的可行性。一项实验测量了受试者在三种不同的热环境中进行认知任务时面部的皮肤温度，分别代表了乘员的微冷、中性和微热的热感。使用EEG头戴式耳机测量脑力负荷，以消除主观偏见。面部温度与脑力劳动的相关性因个体和温度条件的不同而不同。在中性环境中以及耳朵、嘴巴和脖子的区域发现了相对较强的相关性。这些结果还表明，未来的工作应该在延长实验持续时间的情况下收集数据。这是因为观察到面部皮肤温度对精神工作负荷的反应因任务类型而异；因此，增加每种任务的重复性或在实验中使用更具挑战性的任务可能会导致对这种关系的更多洞察。
Mental workload represents the mental resources an individual devotes to a task. In a building environment, understanding how ambient thermal conditions affect occupants' mental workload offers an opportunity to achieve optimal thermal settings for the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. However, directly measuring mental workload on a large and continuous scale requires occupants to perform subjective tests or wear electroencephalogram (EEG) or similar devices, which is impractical. This paper assesses the feasibility of using infrared facial thermography captured by a low-cost thermal camera to disclose mental workload. An experiment was conducted to measure the facial skin temperature while subjects performed cognitive tasks in three different thermal environments, representing occupants' thermal sensation of slightly cool, neutral, and slightly warm. Mental workload was measured using an EEG headset to eliminate subjective bias. The correlations between facial temperature and mental workload vary with different individuals and thermal conditions. Relatively strong correlations are found in the neutral environment and in the regions of ears, mouth, and neck. The results also suggest that future work should collect data under extended experiment duration. This is because it was observed that the response of facial skin temperature to mental workload varies with task type; thus, increasing the repetitiveness for each type of task or using more challenging tasks in the experiment could potentially lead to more insights on this relationship.