Towards Exploring Stress Reactions in Teamwork using Multimodal Physiological Data

In education, while teams of students are learning in a real scenario, many different factors are happening in real-time and can have a significant impact on the way students can improve their skills. Realistic simulated scenarios can help them to achieve their learning goals. However, these close-to-real situations can make them experience stress that can be confronting and hinder learning. In other cases, these stressful experiences are meant to reflect the kinds of pressures they will encounter in authentic workplaces, thus becoming authentic training experiences. There is strong evidence that stress has an important effect on the student's engagement and motivation and consequently influences learning outcomes. In the particular educational context of healthcare (e.g. nursing), teachers commonly have a series of expectations about the moments in which students will have a higher cognitive load and stress that can impact on their learning, depending on the phase of the simulation in which they are and how they move around the space prepared for the simulation. This paper introduces a study with nursing students carrying out a practice teamwork in a simulated scenario divided into 5 different phases with a critical patient, in which students must learn to make life-to-death decisions timely. This paper discusses the multimodal data processing that is being performed to identify if the arousal levels match the teachers' expectations regarding the students' affective situation in each phase