Emotional arousal estimation while reading comics based on physiological signal analysis

Estimating emotions while reading enables new services such as comic recommendation. Most of existing emotion estimation systems employ bulky devices. Furthermore, few applications have been developed for analyzing the emotions while reading. The purpose of our research is to develop a method for estimating emotions while reading. As the target of reading, we select comics, which stimulate emotions often more than other types of documents. As we want our system to be easily usable, we selected sensors embedded in a wristband and an eye tracker. Emotions can be described by two dimensions called emotional valence and arousal. As a first step, we propose in this paper to estimate the emotional arousal. We analyze the electrodermal activity, blood volume pulse, heart rate, skin temperature and pupil diameter of a subject to estimate if the reader feels a high or low arousal while reading. Our experiment shows that for some participants, the arousal can be estimated accurately.