HCC-Small: Do Nintendo Surgeons Defy Stress?

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Stress is an integral part of human existence. It is the primary survival mechanism with which nature endowed human physiology, and in this sense it is the prerequisite of everything else human. Stress is always present as a tonic component to sustain autonomic functions. What is of singular interest is the phasic component of stress, which represents responses to instantaneous or persistent external challenges. It is assumed that patterns of phasic stress responses deeply affect a person's performance and quality of life. However, such patterns have been inadequately quantified and studied up to now. In this project, the PI will explore a novel methodological framework for measuring and understanding the evolution of stress patterns in humans, and for determining their importance in phenotypes and performance. Physiological stress is effected through blood flow redistribution that results in localized thermoregulatory changes; these changes can be sensed by a thermal imaging sensor and analyzed within a computational framework. The PI argues that there is no better place to monitor stress signs than the face, because it is heavily innervated with sympathetic pathways, is amenable to non-contact (passive) sensing, and is open to cross-verification with traditional observational methods from psychology. He further contends that there is no better experimental framework to perform a stress study than when humans are engaged in challenging tasks with substantial stakes, as exemplified by the paradigm of surgical training. In this project, the PI will develop a novel integrated suite of sensing and computational methods to quantify stress. He will use these tools to correlate underlying physiological sensing with overt visual observation, and also to conduct longitudinal, quantifiable monitoring of realistic behavior with zero interference.Broader Impacts: In the short term, the findings from the surgical training study will shed light on the role of stress in a very critical profession. In the long term, not only will the technology resulting from this research be directly applicable to diverse fields such as cyber therapy, medical training, medical imaging and cognitive research, but perhaps more importantly this work will likely deepen our understanding of human-computer interaction and create a fundamentally new interface dimension for human-centric computing.