Thermal Comfort and Stress Recognition in Office Environment

Kizito Nkurikiyeyezu, Kana Shoji, Anna Yokokubo, Guillaume Lopez

2019

Abstract

Work stress and thermal discomfort are some of the hurdles that office workers face every day. Office workers experience a periodic work stress because work is long and mentally challenging. At the same time, current thermal comfort provision technologies are inefficient and consume a large amount of energy. In our previous works, we proposed an efficient thermal comfort provision system that is based on a person's heart rate variability (HRV). However, because work stress can also affect the person's HRV, this paper investigates the possibility to distinguish HRV changes that are due to thermal discomfort from changes that emanate from work stress. We conducted experiments on subjects taking Advanced Trail Making Test (ATMT) and observed that stress alters HRV and that it is possible to distinguish stressed and non-stressed subjects with a 100% accuracy. We validated our method on the multimodal SWELL knowledge work (SWELL-KW) stress dataset and achieved similar results (99.25% accuracy and 99.75% average recall). Further analysis suggests that, although both thermal comfort and work stress affect HRV, their effect is perhaps non-overlapping, and that the two can be distinguished with a near-perfect accuracy. These results indicate that it could be possible to design an automatic and unobtrusive system that delivers thermal comfort and predicts work stress based on people's HRV

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Nkurikiyeyezu K., Shoji K., Yokokubo A. and Lopez G. (2019). Thermal Comfort and Stress Recognition in Office Environment. In Proceedings of the 12th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2019) - Volume 5: HEALTHINF; ISBN 978-989-758-353-7, SciTePress, pages 256-263. DOI: 10.5220/0007368802560263

in Bibtex Style

@conference{healthinf19,
author={Kizito Nkurikiyeyezu and Kana Shoji and Anna Yokokubo and Guillaume Lopez},
title={Thermal Comfort and Stress Recognition in Office Environment},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 12th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2019) - Volume 5: HEALTHINF},
year={2019},
pages={256-263},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0007368802560263},
isbn={978-989-758-353-7},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 12th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2019) - Volume 5: HEALTHINF
TI - Thermal Comfort and Stress Recognition in Office Environment
SN - 978-989-758-353-7
AU - Nkurikiyeyezu K.
AU - Shoji K.
AU - Yokokubo A.
AU - Lopez G.
PY - 2019
SP - 256
EP - 263
DO - 10.5220/0007368802560263
PB - SciTePress