Using BrainWaves as Transparent Biometrics for On-Demand Driver Authentication

Conventional biometric systems mainly assume one-timeonly authentication. However, this technique is not used with user management applications. If a user is replaced by an imposter after the authentication has occurred, the systems cannot detect such a replacement. One solution to this problem is on-demand-authentication, in which users are authenticated on a regular or nonregular schedule, as determined by the system. However, the on-demand-authentication technique requires that we present biometric data without regard to do so. In this paper, we focus on the use of brain waves as transparent biometric signals. In particular, we assume driver authentication and measure the brain waves of drivers when they are performing mental tasks such as tracing routes or using a simplified driving simulator as an actual task. We propose to extract the power spectrum in the α–β band as an individual feature and propose two verification methods based on the similarity of the features. In addition, we propose to divide the α–β band into either four or six partitions and to fuse the similarity scores from all the partitions. We evaluate the verification performance using 23 subjects and obtain an equal error rate of 20-25 %

Unconscious Biometrics for Continuous User Verification

In user management system, continuous or successive (ondemand) authentication is required to prevent identity theft. In particular, biometrics of which data are unconsciously presented to authentication systems is necessary. In this paper, brain waves and intra-palm propagation signals are introduced as biometrics and their verification performances using actually measured data are presented

A health-oriented emotion-centred origami-based PSS concept. A product-service system concept aimed to help users manage and reduce their stress more tangibly to improve their health and well-being.

Emotions have a fundamental role in the experience, perception, cognition, and development of people (Barrett et al., 2016; Plutchik, 2001). Negative emotions such as stress, if not managed appropriately, may be a risk factor in developing diseases such as dementia, cardiovascular problems, and depression, amongst others (Dum et al., 2016; Sandi et al., 2001). This interdisciplinary research presents OrigamEase, a health-oriented emotion-centred origami-based PSS concept to help adults manage their stress more tangibly, in response to its main research question: How can engineering design research contribute to improving people’s emotional health and wellbeing? OrigamEase was designed throughout this research, and its design and testing served to develop a health & well-being oriented, emotion-centred engineering design methodology (HWOEED). Therefore, the design of this methodology is the result of the structuring and ordering of the developmental process of exploring, conducting and streamlining the research, design and testing of OrigamEase. The design of OrigamEase (both the product and the service part) is based on the cognitive research stream of emotions and stress. Therefore, this research also aims to broaden the knowledge about the implications and management of the emotional experience of stress from an engineering and design point of view, complementing the available solutions for stress management through a structured, measurable, and tangible tool. The HWOEED methodology is influenced by Kansei Engineering and Design Thinking methodologies and integrates various engineering design research methods. However, this methodology proposes a different application of the integration of emotional considerations into engineering design processes., it seeks to improve the emotional experience of users to preserve and promote their health and well-being through specifically designed products, services or PSS. Therefore, these designs become the means and not the end of the engineering design efforts. Also, this methodology can be transferrable to other engineering design solutions. OrigamEase was tested with 114 adults between 18 and 70 years old through three pilot tests (n=43) and six trial tests (n=71) using a concurrent triangulation mixed methods design. Then the results from these tests were contrasted with two control tests (n=22). The results show that using OrigamEase reduced the measured stress levels of participants (self-reported, heart rate and electrodermal activity) significantly, supporting the experiment hypothesis. Stress levels were recorded before and after using OrigamEase; then, a repeated-measures t-test was applied to find if these differences were significant or not. After using OrigamEase, 73.2% of participants reported feeling less stressed (mean reduction=13.94%), 85.5% experienced a reduction in their heart rate (mean reduction=9.8 bpm), and 78.9% had a lower electrodermal activity (mean reduction= 10.8 points). The testing of OrigamEase served as an initial application validation of the HWOEED methodology. This research demonstrates that engineering and design fields not only can but need to contribute to research on emotions through interdisciplinary research. Emotions are a fundamental part of all human experiences, impacting a person’s health and well-being profoundly

Drawing QSers' mind : a cognitively-informed critical metaphor analysis tracing the cultural model of the Quantified Self

With the spread of digital surveillance technologies from the domains of military and medical to those of personal and everyday, we have seen invention of novel metaphors to conceptualise our daily practices as well as our selves in relation to such emerging technologies as Big Data, which aggregate, crunch and sort our personal information collected from the sensors and cameras embedded ubiquitously now in our living environment, known as an ‘infosphere.’ They sort our selves in a new way, thus altering our self-concept and informing a new, data-driven self culture. The epitome of this trend is the Quantified Self (QS) movement. The participants, known as QSers and who are prosumers, seek ‘self knowledge through numbers’ generated by commercial self-monitoring devices, such as Fitbit and Mi Band. They put their bodily activities under self-surveillance for becoming the experts of self-management and self-optimisation. The global popularisation of QS culture has three implications for our human condition. First, it creates a sham utopia. The platform economy brings into being a precariat, who struggle daily for security and success. In response, the QS gadget companies advertise to a white, middle-class clientele that they can offer them both. Second, it promotes neoliberal reflexive practices and discourse of selfhood. QS culture is historically rooted in the American success culture, which prizes individual success made through self-reliance and continuous self-reinvention. This culture foregrounds personal agency in influencing individuals’ living conditions and life chances, while discounting social structural factors. Third, it makes privacy, hence self-reinvention, problematic. When it comes to the issue of ownership of QSers’ self-data, it is ambiguous to whom they belong and whether the QSers can still enjoy ‘the right to forget’ once the data are uploaded to the cloud. Sociologists have studied the QS culture and its relations to neoliberalism, but they have not tackled the QSers’ subjective experience, particularly their own discourse and mind, in a systematic manner. Meanwhile, although cognitive linguists have had the tools to probe QSers’ discourse, mind and culture, or the cognitive schemas and structures that influence QSers’ beliefs and behaviours, they have not done so, either. Therefore, my thesis contributes to the QS research by cross-fertilising, or transgressing the boundaries of, the disciplines, adding to it another dimension of cognitively-informed critical metaphor analysis of QSers’ mind. I have applied critical discourse analysis for both literature review and empirical analysis. For the empirical chapters, I have systematically mapped out the relations between a QSer’s use of conceptual metaphors in a blog post and the underlying cognitive schemas, which constitute a cultural model of Quantified Self for a sample consisting of a small corpus (52,177 words in total). I used the methods of MIP and SMA to identify the linguistic, conceptual and systematic metaphors in a prototypical blog post, sampled from my proprietary corpus of 40 unique QSers’ blog texts. Based on the identifications, I further traced three metaphor trajectories, or the blogger’s thought patterns, that involved the self, QS tools and data. I found that 1) the blogger thought his HEALTH CONDITIONS WERE OBJECTS that could be managed and controlled with hard work and help from self-monitoring devices, thus giving him a sense of self-made success and being in control. 2) He thought the QS TOOLS WERE PEOPLE, who were productive, capable, intelligent and friendly. This reflects the infosphere’s structural influence on people’s cognition, which decentres the humans and places them on par with other informational agents. 3) He conceived that his DATA WERE VALUABLE RESOURCES, whose ownership was unclear. Meanwhile, alternative metaphors that were relegated to the background by the QS culture were revived and discussed along these trajectories. Altogether, they have demonstrated the framing effects of QS metaphors, i.e. the metaphors can both enable and constrain a QSer’s conceptualisation of self in connection with data and self-control

Drawing QSers' mind : a cognitively-informed critical metaphor analysis tracing the cultural model of the Quantified Self

With the spread of digital surveillance technologies from the domains of military and medical to those of personal and everyday, we have seen invention of novel metaphors to conceptualise our daily practices as well as our selves in relation to such emerging technologies as Big Data, which aggregate, crunch and sort our personal information collected from the sensors and cameras embedded ubiquitously now in our living environment, known as an ‘infosphere.’ They sort our selves in a new way, thus altering our self-concept and informing a new, data-driven self culture. The epitome of this trend is the Quantified Self (QS) movement. The participants, known as QSers and who are prosumers, seek ‘self knowledge through numbers’ generated by commercial self-monitoring devices, such as Fitbit and Mi Band. They put their bodily activities under self-surveillance for becoming the experts of self-management and self-optimisation. The global popularisation of QS culture has three implications for our human condition. First, it creates a sham utopia. The platform economy brings into being a precariat, who struggle daily for security and success. In response, the QS gadget companies advertise to a white, middle-class clientele that they can offer them both. Second, it promotes neoliberal reflexive practices and discourse of selfhood. QS culture is historically rooted in the American success culture, which prizes individual success made through self-reliance and continuous self-reinvention. This culture foregrounds personal agency in influencing individuals’ living conditions and life chances, while discounting social structural factors. Third, it makes privacy, hence self-reinvention, problematic. When it comes to the issue of ownership of QSers’ self-data, it is ambiguous to whom they belong and whether the QSers can still enjoy ‘the right to forget’ once the data are uploaded to the cloud. Sociologists have studied the QS culture and its relations to neoliberalism, but they have not tackled the QSers’ subjective experience, particularly their own discourse and mind, in a systematic manner. Meanwhile, although cognitive linguists have had the tools to probe QSers’ discourse, mind and culture, or the cognitive schemas and structures that influence QSers’ beliefs and behaviours, they have not done so, either. Therefore, my thesis contributes to the QS research by cross-fertilising, or transgressing the boundaries of, the disciplines, adding to it another dimension of cognitively-informed critical metaphor analysis of QSers’ mind. I have applied critical discourse analysis for both literature review and empirical analysis. For the empirical chapters, I have systematically mapped out the relations between a QSer’s use of conceptual metaphors in a blog post and the underlying cognitive schemas, which constitute a cultural model of Quantified Self for a sample consisting of a small corpus (52,177 words in total). I used the methods of MIP and SMA to identify the linguistic, conceptual and systematic metaphors in a prototypical blog post, sampled from my proprietary corpus of 40 unique QSers’ blog texts. Based on the identifications, I further traced three metaphor trajectories, or the blogger’s thought patterns, that involved the self, QS tools and data. I found that 1) the blogger thought his HEALTH CONDITIONS WERE OBJECTS that could be managed and controlled with hard work and help from self-monitoring devices, thus giving him a sense of self-made success and being in control. 2) He thought the QS TOOLS WERE PEOPLE, who were productive, capable, intelligent and friendly. This reflects the infosphere’s structural influence on people’s cognition, which decentres the humans and places them on par with other informational agents. 3) He conceived that his DATA WERE VALUABLE RESOURCES, whose ownership was unclear. Meanwhile, alternative metaphors that were relegated to the background by the QS culture were revived and discussed along these trajectories. Altogether, they have demonstrated the framing effects of QS metaphors, i.e. the metaphors can both enable and constrain a QSer’s conceptualisation of self in connection with data and self-control

Mental-State Estimation, 1987

Reports on the measurement and evaluation of the physiological and mental state of operators are presented

On the Recognition of Emotion from Physiological Data

This work encompasses several objectives, but is primarily concerned with an experiment where 33 participants were shown 32 slides in order to create ‗weakly induced emotions‘. Recordings of the participants‘ physiological state were taken as well as a self report of their emotional state. We then used an assortment of classifiers to predict emotional state from the recorded physiological signals, a process known as Physiological Pattern Recognition (PPR). We investigated techniques for recording, processing and extracting features from six different physiological signals: Electrocardiogram (ECG), Blood Volume Pulse (BVP), Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), Electromyography (EMG), for the corrugator muscle, skin temperature for the finger and respiratory rate. Improvements to the state of PPR emotion detection were made by allowing for 9 different weakly induced emotional states to be detected at nearly 65% accuracy. This is an improvement in the number of states readily detectable. The work presents many investigations into numerical feature extraction from physiological signals and has a chapter dedicated to collating and trialing facial electromyography techniques. There is also a hardware device we created to collect participant self reported emotional states which showed several improvements to experimental procedure