Miniature ECG Acquisition and Processing for Stress assessment during Virtual Reality Applications

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Virtual reality (VR) technologies have been applied as a professional training tool in a number of sectors.**Compared with traditional training methods in a real environment, VR training environments provide**significant advantages including, but not limited to, consistency across trainees, lower cost for reconfiguration**and upgrade, easy quantification of training results and efficiency. EXO (Operating as IVD Workforce Corp)**has been pioneering in this field, i.e. incorporating VR into the training curriculum for mission-critical**positions, such as nuclear power plant operators, riot-control police officers etc. One of the issues in**professional training for these mission-critical positions, both in physical and virtual environments, is the lack**of easy methods to assess the physical and psychological condition of trainees. Specifically, the level of mental**and physical stress cannot be accurately assessed during the training, making it difficult to ensure that the**simulated environment presents a similar level of stress to that encountered in the actual working environment**and scenario. This project aims at developing a wearable sub-system of EXO's current VR training system that**would allow real-time assessment of mental stress during training sessions, by acquisition and processing**electrocardiogram (ECG). The sub-system will be physically integrated with EXO's current head-mounted**display (HMD), and stress estimation algorithms will be light-weight in its computational requirement, so it**can be implemented in EXO's current embedded environment. The outcome of the current project will provide**a significant competitive advantage for EXO's VR training tool for missing critical personnel, as it can assess**the mental condition of the trainees in real-time, thus providing an added layer of information regarding the**effectiveness of VR training program, thereby maximizing the benefit of the VR training paradigm.