Heart Rate Monitoring as an Easy Way to Increase Engagement in Human-Agent Interaction

Jérémy Frey

2015

Abstract

Physiological sensors are gaining the attention of manufacturers and users. As denoted by devices such as smartwatches or the newly released Kinect 2 – which can covertly measure heartbeats – or by the popularity of smartphone apps that track heart rate during fitness activities. Soon, physiological monitoring could become widely accessible and transparent to users. We demonstrate how one could take advantage of this situation to increase users’ engagement and enhance user experience in human-agent interaction. We created an experimental protocol involving embodied agents – “virtual avatars”. Those agents were displayed alongside a beating heart. We compared a condition in which this feedback was simply duplicating the heart rates of users to another condition in which it was set to an average heart rate. Results suggest a superior social presence of agents when they display feedback similar to users’ internal state. This physiological “similarity-attraction” effect may lead, with little effort, to a better acceptance of agents and robots by the general public.

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Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

Frey J. (2015). Heart Rate Monitoring as an Easy Way to Increase Engagement in Human-Agent Interaction . In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Physiological Computing Systems - Volume 1: PhyCS, ISBN 978-989-758-085-7, pages 129-136. DOI: 10.5220/0005226101290136


in Bibtex Style

@conference{phycs15,
author={Jérémy Frey},
title={Heart Rate Monitoring as an Easy Way to Increase Engagement in Human-Agent Interaction},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Physiological Computing Systems - Volume 1: PhyCS,},
year={2015},
pages={129-136},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0005226101290136},
isbn={978-989-758-085-7},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Physiological Computing Systems - Volume 1: PhyCS,
TI - Heart Rate Monitoring as an Easy Way to Increase Engagement in Human-Agent Interaction
SN - 978-989-758-085-7
AU - Frey J.
PY - 2015
SP - 129
EP - 136
DO - 10.5220/0005226101290136