Emotional well-being in smart environments: an experiment with EEG

Abstract

Well-being in smart environments refers to the mental, physiological and emotional states of people passing through environments where sensors, actuators and computers are intertwined with everyday tasks. In that context, well-being must be measurable and, to some extent, susceptible to external influence within the short time-spans that people spend in those environments. Continuing our previous studies, we evaluate an experiment for well-being measurement and control, introducing EEG observations in the experiment. EEG, as an immediate and objective proxy of one's mental, physiological and emotional state, provides ground truth for comparisons between sensors in the smart environment. We concentrate on the test subject's emotional state, observed by way of comparing changes in the alpha frequency power levels in the left and right frontal cortical areas, respectively corresponding to positive and negative emotions. The results show that our experimental set-up induces significant changes in the test subject's emotional state, paving the way for further studies on influencing personal well-being.