HCC-Small: Do Nintendo Surgeons Defy Stress?

压力是人类生存不可分割的一部分。它是大自然赋予人类生理机能的主要生存机制，从这个意义上说，它是人类其他一切的先决条件。压力总是作为维持自主神经功能的滋补成分存在。令人感兴趣的是压力的相位成分，它代表了对瞬时或持续的外部挑战的反应。人们认为，阶段性应激反应的模式会深刻影响一个人的表现和生活质量。然而，到目前为止，这种模式还没有得到充分的量化和研究。在这个项目中，PI将探索一种新的方法框架，用于测量和理解人类应激模式的演变，并确定它们在表型和表现中的重要性。生理应激是通过血流重新分配而产生的，血流重新分配导致局部的体温调节变化；这些变化可以通过热成像传感器感知，并在计算框架内进行分析。PI认为，没有比脸部更好的地方来监测压力信号了，因为脸部有大量的交感神经通路，可以接受非接触（被动）感知，并且可以与传统的心理学观察方法交叉验证。他进一步认为，当人类从事具有重大利害关系的挑战性任务时，没有比外科手术训练范例更好的实验框架来进行压力研究了。在这个项目中，PI将开发一套新的传感和计算方法来量化应力。他将使用这些工具将潜在的生理感知与公开的视觉观察联系起来，并对零干扰的现实行为进行纵向、可量化的监测。更广泛的影响：在短期内，来自外科训练研究的发现将阐明压力在一个非常关键的职业中的作用。从长远来看，这项研究产生的技术不仅可以直接应用于网络治疗、医学培训、医学成像和认知研究等不同领域，而且更重要的是，这项工作可能会加深我们对人机交互的理解，并为以人为中心的计算创造一个全新的界面维度。

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.