Abstract—Human computer interaction (HCI) is 
currently aimed at the design of interactive computer 
applications for human use while preventing user 
frustration. When considering the nature of modern 
computer applications, such as e-learning systems and 
computer games, it appears that human involvement 
cannot be improved only by using traditional 
approaches, such as nice user interfaces. For a pleasant 
human involvement, these computer applications 
require that the computers should have the ability to 
naturally adapt to their users and this requires the 
computers to have the ability to recognize user 
emotions. For recognizing emotions currently most 
preferred research approach is aimed at facial 
expression based emotion recognition, which seems to 
have many limitations. Therefore, in this paper, we 
propose a method to determine the psychological 
involvement of a human during a multimedia 
interaction session using the eye movement activity 
and arousal evaluation. In our approach we use a low 
cost hardware/software combination, which determines 
eye movement activity based on electrooculogram 
(EOG) signals and the level of arousal using galvanic 
skin response (GSR) signals. The results obtained 
using six individuals show that the nature of 
involvement can be recognized using these affect 
signals as optimal levels and distracted conditions.

Index Terms—Arousal, Attention, Cognition, 
Emotion, EOG, Eye Movement Activity, GSR, HCI, 
Human Involvement, Multimedia Interactions.

II. NTRODUCTION

Most modern multimedia applications come up with very attractive user interfaces and 
HCI studies the design of user interfaces in greater 
detail [20]. While most applications benefit from 
nice user interfaces, such as iPhone Twitterrific, 
there is another category of applications where 
the human-machine interaction could be improved 
by having machines naturally adapt to their users, 
for instance tutoring systems. In such systems the 
adaptation involves the consideration of emotional

Manuscript received March 12, 2009. Accepted November 
20th, 2009. This research was funded by the National Science 
Foundation, Sri Lanka.

Hiran B. Ekanayake is with the University of Colombo School 
of Computing , 35, Reid Avenue, Colombo 7, Sri Lanka (e-mail: 
hbe@ucsc.cmb.ac.lk). 

Damitha D. Karunarathna and Kamalanath P. Hewagamage 
are also with the University of Colombo School of Computing , 
35, Reid Avenue, Colombo 7, Sri Lanka (e-mail: ddk@ucsc.cmb.
ac.lk, kph@ucsc.cmb.ac.lk).

Determining the Psychological Involvement 
in Multimedia Interactions

Hiran B. Ekanayake, Damitha D. Karunarathna and Kamalanath P. Hewagamage

information, possibly including the expression of 
frustration, dislike, confusion, excitement, etc. This 
emotional communication along with handling
affective information in HCI is currently studied 
under affective computing [35].

Human emotions are believed to be containing an 
emotional judgment about one’s general state and 
bodily reactions [6] [42]. For instance, when a driver 
cuts one off, he/she would experience physiological 
changes such as increases in heart rate and breathing 
rate, as well as feeling and expression of fear and 
anger. Literature suggests many research approaches 
that can be used to recognize emotions such as by 
using facial expressions [39], changes in tone of 
voice, affect signals [17] and electroencephalography 
(EEG) [7]. However, these approaches contain their 
own limitations.

Humans’ abilities to make decisions, judgments 
and keep information in memory are all studied 
under cognitive science [15].  Although there is no 
widely accepted definition for human attention, it is 
considered as a cognitive process that helps humans 
to selectively concentrate on few tasks while 
ignoring other tasks, for instance concentrating 
on a movie played on a computer screen ignoring 
what is happening outside. According to recent 
developments in cognitive science emotions also 
play a major role in human cognition especially 
in decision making and memory, such as flashbulb 
memory [15][42].

The research work discussed in this paper 
identifies human involvement in HCI as a measurable 
psychological phenomenon and it proposes several 
involvement types. Some of these involvement types 
can be considered as improving HCI while others are 
none or less involvement conditions. In determining 
human involvement the work proposes a low-cost 
hardware/software approach that consists of GSR 
and EOG sensing devices and recording software.

The remaining sections of this paper are organized 
as follows: In the related work section, the two 
popular approaches to improve human involvement 
in multimedia interactions are presented with their 
positive and negative aspects. The section also 
gives a brief overview of mental tasks, the role of 
attention in coordinating mental tasks, the correlation 
between eye activity and visual attention, the role 
of emotions in humans, recognizing emotions 
from psychophysiological signals especially using 

The International Journal on Advances in ICT for Emerging Regions 2009  02  (01) : 11 - 20



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12                                                       Hiran B. Ekanayake, Damitha D. Karunarathna and Kamalanath P. Hewagamage                                                        

the changes in skin conductance, and human 
involvement under cognitive emotional valances. 
The methodology section discusses the proposed 
methodology of determining psychological 
involvement in multimedia interactions and it 
identifies several involvement types with their 
distinguishable characteristics with respect to eye 
activity and GSR activity. This section also includes 
a brief discussion of proposed low-cost hardware/
software framework for evaluating the proposed 
involvement cases. Experimental process and results 
are presented in the results section. Finally, the last 
section concludes by commenting on the findings 
and suggestive future work.

RelaTeD WORkII. 

Improving Human Involvement in A. 
Multimedia Interactions

HCI attempts to improve human involvement 
in computer-based multimedia interactions by 
improving user interfaces and presentation of 
multimedia content [20]. This also includes 
monitoring and profiling of human behavioural 
patterns, such as their preferred visiting paths and 
selections, and personalization of multimedia 
content to support the preferences of individual 
human users [5][11][19]. 

Although this method has the potential to assign 
similar patterns for similar multimedia content, for 
different types of content, the predicted patterns may 
not give acceptable outputs. Another drawback of this 
approach is that this method is less sensitive to human 
mood changes and long-term behavioural changes. 
Therefore, as an improvement to this approach it has 
been proposed that human emotional information 
captured in real-time can be used as a feedback to 
make the machines adapt to its users and change the 
presentation accordingly [36]. Currently, the most 
prevailing method for capturing human emotional 
information is by capturing facial expressions of 
users. The challenges for this method are that the 
quality of a facial expression analyser depends on a 
number of properties, such as accurate facial image 
acquisition, lighting conditions, head motion, etc. 
[33] and masked emotional communication [36], for 
instance a “poker face” to mask a true confusion.

On the contrary, another school of researchers 
are developing theories to model human like 
cognition and related aspects in a computer to make 
the machines think and act like humans, thus with 
the expectation that these models can predict and 
decide how it should communicate information 
with humans in a human-like manner improving 
the relationship. These attempts are varying from 
artificial intelligence (AI) based techniques [9]

[32] to cognitive modelling techniques like ACT-R 
models [3]. Although, the cognitive science day-to-
day reveal many other functions and relationships 
between human cognition, emotion and physiology, 
it is in doubt that the true human behaviour can ever 
be modelled in a computer when the biological and 
sub-symbolic nature of humans is considered [42].

Mental Tasks, Attention, and Eye ActivityB. 
In psychology it is believed that people have only 

a certain amount of mental energy to devote to all the 
possible tasks and to all the incoming information 
confronting them [15]. Nature has resolved this 
problem by giving the ability to filter out unwanted 
information and to focus the cognitive resources on 
few tasks or events rather than on many through a 
method called attention [15][40]. According to the 
model of memory [15], the working memory is 
the area that contains information about currently 
attended tasks. The attention plays an important 
role concerned with coordinating information in 
the working memory resulting from the outside 
environment as well as information from the long 
term memories. The Kahneman’s model of attention 
and effort is a model that explains the relationship 
between mental effort for tasks and attention [15]
[25]. According to this model the attention is 
enforced through an allocation policy which is 
affected by both involuntary and voluntary activities. 
For example, while opera lovers are more likely to 
concentrate during an opera session, others would 
feel drowsy even if they want to be awake.

Although there are lot more theories to explain 
the attention, one prevailing theory that explains 
the visual attention is the spotlight metaphor that 
compares attention to a spotlight that highlights 
whatever information the system has currently 
focused on [15][40]. According to this theory, one 
can attend to only one region of space at a time 
and shift of attention is considered as a change 
of previously focused tasks. Spotlight theory is 
used in implementing visual attention in modern 
cognitive modelling architectures [2]. Apart from 
the visual attention, auditory attention also plays an 
important role concerning attention. Theories such 
as Broadbent’s filter theory, Treisman’s attenuation 
theory and Deutsch and Deutsch’s theory suggest 
that all incoming messages are processed up to a 
certain level before they are selectively attended to 
[15][40]. 

The published evidence supports that eye 
movements directed to a location in space are 
preceded by a shift of visual attention to the same 
location [18][21][23]. However, the attention is 
free to move independent of eyes. Eye-tracking 
is one of the most active research areas studying 



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eye movements and these eye movements consist 
of saccades and fixations [12]. Saccades are rapid 
ballistic changes in eye position that occur at a rate 
of about 3-4 per second and the eye is blind during 
these movements. The information is acquired 
during long fixations of about 250 milliseconds that 
intervene during these saccades.

Biomedical investigations recognize EOG as a 
technique that can be used to measure the gaze angle 
and assess the dynamics of eye movements [24][26]
[27][37]. In this method it is required to place the 
sensors on the sides of the eyes for measuring the 
horizontal motions of the eyes and above and below 
the eyes if the vertical motions of the eyes are also 
studied.

Emotions and Psychophysiological SignalsC. 
There is no universally agreed explanation for 

emotional responses in humans. Literature suggests 
many reasons for emotions and many other factors 
having influence on it, such as limbic system activity 
[6][42], asymmetries between cerebral hemispheres 
[29], gender differences [34], mental states and 
dispositions, and disequilibria between the self and 
the world [10].

Emotional responses are considered to have 
two levels of responses [42], cognitive judgment 
about one’s general state and bodily reaction. 
The cognitive judgment mainly contributes to 
the motivation of goal accomplishment, memory 
processing, deliberative reasoning, and learning. 
Bodily reactions of emotions are of two forms, i.e. 
expressions and physiological signals. This response 
is considered to have two dimensions: pleasure 
(pleasant and unpleasant) and arousal (aroused or 
unaroused).  Emotion research mainly focuses on 
this bodily reaction in emotion recognition.

Facial expression analysis is one of the heavily 
researched areas in recognizing emotions. Paul 
Ekman has studied the presence of basic emotional 
categories expressed by facial expressions across 
different cultures and ethnicities and identified 
eight facial expressions [13], happiness, contempt, 
sadness, anger, surprise, fear, disgust, and neutral. 
It is believed that these basic emotions provide 
the ingredients for more complex emotions, such 
as guilt, pride and shame [22]. One of the major 
challenges for facial expressions based approaches 
is that people’s ability to mask their true expressions 
if they do not like to communicate their true feelings 
[36].

In contrast, most emerging methods for emotion 
recognition are provided by peripheral and 
central nervous system signals [7][10][29].  The 
sympathetic activation of autonomic nervous system 
of the peripheral nervous system and the activation 
of endocrine system introduce changes to the heart 

rate, skin conductivity, blood volume pressure, 
respiration, and many other sympathetic organs 
which can be detected using biofeedback sensing 
instruments. Healey and Picard [17] in their paper 
present how the emotions can be recognized from 
these physiological signals with a higher accuracy. 
Apart from the peripheral signals, EEG signals 
from the brain have also proved the possibility in 
assessing the level of arousal [7].

GSR or skin conductance response (SCR) is 
another popular method known to be having a nearly 
linear correlation with the person’s arousal level thus 
with the cognitive emotional activity of a person 
[38][41]. Therefore, GSR is used as a method for 
quantifying a person’s emotional reaction to different 
stimuli presented. Literature suggests that the low 
level of cortical arousal is associated with relaxation, 
hypnosis, and subjective experience of psyche states 
and unconscious manifestations, whereas the high 
level of cortical arousal is associated with increased 
power of reflection, focused concentration, increased 
reading speed, and increased capacity for long-term 
recall. The skin conductivity or GSR is associated 
with this cortical arousal with the relationship 
that when the arousal of the cortex increases, the 
conductivity of the skin also increases, and when the 
arousal of the cortex decreases, the conductivity of 
the skin also decreases and this is resulting from the 
“fight or flight” behaviour of the autonomic nervous 
system. However, literature shows few other 
responses which can have an impact on the electrical 
resistance of the skin. The following summarizes the 
causes for skin electrical activity:

Tarchanoff response is a change in DC potential • 
across neurons of the autonomic nervous 
system connected to the sensory-motor strip of 
the cortex. It has an immediate effect (0.2 to 
0.5 seconds) on the subject’s level of arousal 
and this effect can be detected using hand-held 
electrodes, because hands have a particularly 
large representation of nerve endings on the 
sensory motor strip of the cortex.
“Fight or flight” stress response of the autonomic • 
nervous system comes into action as the arousal 
increases as a result of increased sweating due 
to release of adrenaline. This is a slow response 
compared to Tarchanoff response.
Forebrain arousal is a complex physiological • 
response, unique to man, affecting the resistance 
in thumb and forefinger.

Changes in alpha rhythms cause blood capillaries 
to enlarge and ultimately this too affects the skin 
resistance. 

D.     Cognition, Emotion and Brain’s Involvement
 The emotional reaction of body has sympathetic 

effects to the body for “fight or flight” behaviour as



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14                                                       Hiran B. Ekanayake, Damitha D. Karunarathna and Kamalanath P. Hewagamage                                                        

well as increased activation in the reticular 
activation system (RAS) [4], [38]. The reticular 
activation system is the centre of attention and 
motivation of the brain [1], [28], [30]. It is 
also the centre of balance for the other systems 
involved in learning, self-control or inhibition, 
and motivation. When it functions normally, it 
provides the neural connections that are needed 
for the processing and learning of information, 
and the ability to pay attention to the correct task. 
However, if over excited, it distracts the individual 
through excessive startle responses, hyper-vigilant, 
touching everything, talking too much, restless and 
hyperactive behaviours. Fig. 1 shows the co-relation 
of attention and arousal.

Fig. 1.  The interaction of attention and arousal.

meThODOlOgyIII. 

During a computer-based multimedia interaction 
session, the optimal involvement can be expected as 
the human participant looks towards the computer 
screen and psychologically experiences the content 
presented by the computer. However, in real 
situations this expected involvement behaviour can 
not be observed all the time as the disturbances can 
occur as a result of outside events and internal stress 
responses of the participant. 

In our research, we hypothesize that the eye 
movement activity measured as EOG signals can be 
used to distinguish whether a participant is attending 
the visual content presented at the computer or not. 
The reason for using an EOG based approach is 
that EOG signals can be captured using low cost 
hardware (cost about USD 1000) in contrast to 
using expensive eye tracking systems (cost about 
USD 10000). We expect low magnitude EOG 
signals as a result of saccade eye movements when 
the participant’s visual space is limited by screen 
dimensions than when the participant is attending 
the general visual space or the environment (Fig. 
2). Since the primary task during a multimedia 
interaction session is to pay attention to the content 
that appears on the computer screen, we assume 
that the fixations during eye movements are mostly 
located within the visual space defined by screen 
dimensions.

Fig. 2.  Subject’s limited visual space during multimedia 
interaction.

Apart form using EOG signals to distinguish 
visual focus, these signals may be used to identify 
inattention conditions, such as drowsy situations. 
There are empirical evidences supporting that one’s 
eye blink rate increases as one gets drowsy [31].

Although, EOG can be used to identify visual 
focus, it is less effective in determining whether 
the participant is psychologically experiencing the 
multimedia content, because, simply looking at the 
computer screen does not mean that the participant 
is mentally attending to the content that is seen. 
Therefore, to identify this mental involvement we 
employ skin conductivity based measurements 
or GSR. Literature points out that the maximum 
attention or the optimal involvement can be gained 
when the arousal is moderate whereas too much or 
too little arousal does not give satisfactory levels of 
involvement.

In our research we propose low cost hardware 
and software solution to capture EOG and GSR 
signals. Our EOG hardware unit is based on Grant’s 
sound card EEG project [8] (Fig. 3). The cost for 
building this unit is around USD 100 whereas 
commercial products are ten times more expensive 
than this. The software to interface with this device 
is freely available in the project website and for our 
solution we have used the NeuroProbe. To detect 
EOG signals it is required to place electrodes at 
both sides of eyes and middle of forehead. We have 
developed a headband mounting these electrodes, so 
that the electrode placements can be done easily and 
without much difficulty to the participant. The EOG 
hardware then receives EOG potentials which are in 
the range of 10 – 100 microvolts and these potentials 
are amplified, modulated and transmitted to the 
computer through the sound card. At the computer, 
NeuroProbe software demodulates the signal and 
filters out unwanted components, such as 50 Hz A/C 
interferences and electromyography (EMG) signals, 
recovering original EOG waveforms.



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Fig. 3.  EEG hardware unit to capture EOG signals.

For capturing GSR signals we used a LEGO 
mindstorms brick based solution [16] (Fig. 4). This 
unit is about USD 100 whereas commercial GSR 
recorders cost more than USD 1000. The electrodes 
are wrapped around middle and index fingers of 
the left hand of a participant, so that the right hand 
is free to use for other tasks, such as controlling 
the mouse. Although the brick can take readings 
at a rate of about 40 samples/second, since the 
transmission to the computer is through an IR link, 
the achievable transmission rate is about 2 samples/
second. To reduce the errors, we have implemented a 
Gaussian smoother in the brick software. Moreover, 
the readings are represented as a value between 0 
to 1023, called the raw value, and the relationship 
between the actual skin resistance (SR) and the 
reading is given by, reading value = 1023*SR/
(SR+10000). We thought this accuracy is sufficient 
because usually in emotion research the response 
window of 1 to 10 seconds in analysed [17].

Fig. 4.  LEGO GSR sensor unit.

Finally, EOG signals received from the NeuroProbe 
and GSR signals received from the brick are fused 
at a software developed by us. This software is also 
capable of annotating the signals based on media 

events, such as media transitions and user defined 
events. The recorded signals are then analysed using 
MATLAB signal processing toolbox [43].

ResUlTsIv. 
The experiments were conducted using six 

volunteers labelled A, B, C, D, E and F (Fig. 5).

Fig. 5.  Six individuals facing the experiment.

Multimedia interaction session consisted of 
several multimedia types and they were labelled 
as I01, I02, etc. Table I gives a brief description of 
multimedia interactions used in the experiment.

TABLE I
mUlTImeDIa INTeRaCTIONs UseD IN The expeRImeNT

Interaction 
ID

Description

I01 A song without visual content

I02
Still and exciting picture without audi-
tory content

I03
A video clip containing an exciting 
event

I05 A video lecture without exciting events
I06 Repeat of the same interaction I05

I08
A video clip containing an exciting 
event

I13
After computer-based multimedia inter-
actions, the recording was continued for 
a while without informing the subject

For each subject, for each interaction, GSR and 
EOG signals were recorded. The letter G represents 
a GSR waveform. The time is measured in seconds.

Fig. 6 shows the GSR waveforms recorded for 
each subject over the interactions I01, I02 and I03.

Graphs (a) and (c) in Fig. 6 show some relationship 
between the GSR signal waveforms of each subject. 
However, graph (b) does not show much change in 
its signal waveforms or clear relationship between 
signals.



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TABLE II
meaN sIgNal magNITUeDs Of eOg WavefORms Of eaCh 

paRTICIpaNT OveR INTeRaCTIONs 101, 102 aND 103

Subject I01 I02 I03

A 556 620 510

B 345 524 623

C 518 587 343

D 476 352 363

E 590 487 563

F 278 292 276

Average 460 477 446

Fig. 7 shows samples of EOG waveforms 
recorded for each subject over the interactions I03 
and I13. The letters L and R represent left and right 
eye EOG waveforms respectively. For instance, 
B05L corresponds to the left eye EOG waveform 
for the interaction I05 for the subject B.

(a)

(a)

(b)

(c)
Fig. 6.  GSR waveforms for each individual for (a) interaction 
I01, (b) interaction I02 and (c) interaction I03.

In order to check the quality of visual attention 
over three types of multimedia interactions, I01, 
I02 and I03, the mean signal magnitudes of EOG 
waveforms were calculated for each subject and 
tabulated in Table II.

The results in Table II show that the interaction 
I03 has the lowest average EOG value compared to 
the interactions I01 and I02.



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(b)
Fig. 7.  EOG signals for each subject for the (a) on-screen 
interaction (I03) and (b) off-screen interaction (I13). 

Table III gives the mean values of EOG signal 
waveforms obtained for the interactions I03, I05, 
I06, I08 and I13 and it compares the increase of 
average EOG signal magnitude over the interaction 
I13 respect to interactions I03, I05, I06 and I08 
(denoted as I03..8).

TABLE III
a COmpaRIsON Of meaN sIgNal magNITUDes Of eOg WavefORms 

BeTWeeN ON-sCReeN INTeRaCTIONs aND aN Off-sCReeN INTeRaCTION 

Sub-
ject

I03 I05 I06 I08 I03..8 I13 In-
crease

A 510 679 699 690 644 2210 343%

B 623 492 583 848 636 1214 191%

C 343 Error Error Error 343 1170 341%

D 363 399 592 309 416 1150 276%

E 563 869 827 578 710 1369 193%

F 276 572 434 418 425 612 144%

Aver-
age

446 602 627 569 561 1288 248%

From Fig. 7 and results in Table III it is apparent 
that average EOG signal magnitudes for off-screen 
interaction has 1.5 to 3.5 times increased value 
than the average EOG magnitudes for on-screen 
interactions.

Fig. 8 shows the GSR waveforms recorded for 
each subject over the interactions I05, I08 and I13. 
Table IV gives the means calculated for each of the 
GSR signals.

(a)

(b)

(c)
Fig. 8.  GSR waveforms for each individual for (a) interaction 
I05, (b) interaction I08 and (c) interaction I13.

From Fig. 6 (c) and Fig. 8 (b) it can be observed 
that for all the participants over the time segment 
150-200 seconds of the interaction I03 and the time 
segment 25-35 seconds of the interaction I08 the 
GSR waveforms show a similar pattern. During 
these time segments the participants were observing 
the exciting events contained in those multimedia 
documents and from their facial expressions it was 
observed that they are getting excited for a while.



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From Fig. 8 (a) it can be observed that for 
participants B and D the GSR waveforms show very 
similar patterns and except for participant E all the 
other GSR waveforms show less variance. During 
this interaction the participants were observing 
the video lecture and except the participant E all 
the others showed they are concentrating over the 
interaction form their facial expressions. However, 
it was observed that participant E is having some 
body movements. 

Fig. 8 (c) identifies the GSR waveforms when the 
participants are not attending on-screen interactions. 
From Table IV it is apparent that off-screen 
interaction gives the lowest mean GSR signal values 
for all the participants than on-screen interactions. 
Emotionally significant interactions, i.e. I03 and 
I08, give the moderate mean GSR signal values and 
video lecture interactions, i.e. I05 and I06, give the 
highest mean GSR signal values.

Fig. 9 shows the GSR waveforms for subjects B 
and D over the interactions I05 and I06.

During the interaction I05 it was observed from 
their facial expressions that both participants B and 
D were concentrating over the interaction. However, 
when the interaction is repeated (i.e. I06) boring (or 
inattention) behaviours were observed. The boring 
behaviour was distinguishable from periodic rapid

(a)

(b)
Fig. 9.  GSR waveforms for the interactions I05 and I06 of (a) 
participant B and (b) participant D.

eye activity and frustrated facial expressions. Fig. 
10 shows instances of EOG waveforms when the 
participant is concentrating during the interaction 
I05 and falling into boring and drowsy (inattention) 
situation during the interaction I06.

Fig. 10.  EOG waveform instances of the subject B (a) 
concentrating over the interaction I05, (b) active during the 
interaction I06, and (c) drowsy during the interaction I06.

Table V gives the means and standard deviations 
calculated for EOG signal waveforms of window 
size 10 seconds for randomly selected instances of 
interaction I05 and instances when concentration 
type (active) and drowsy type behaviours are present 
during the interaction I06.

From Table V results it can be identified that 
in most situations the EOG mean and standard 
deviation values of I06 report about 25% increased 
values than the values for the interaction I05.

DIsCUssIONv. 
The results in Table III have identified the 

effectiveness of using EOG signals to differentiate 
the users’ attention to on-screen interactions from 
off-screen interactions. Further the results have 



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proved the appropriateness of using EOG and GSR 
signals to distinguish human involvement with 
multimedia interactions. Multimedia documents 
having emotionally significant events can result in 
more active involvement and it can be identified 
from the resulting GSR signals having higher 
variances, moderate mean GSR values and changes 
in GSR pattern having correlation with emotional 
events in the media. The GSR waveform becomes 
smoother and reaches a higher mean value when the 
human is concentrating on an interaction having no 
or less emotionally significant contents. However, 
this type of involvement can also fall into inattention 
if the human feels the interaction is boring. Since 
GSR alone cannot identify concentration from 
inattention, the EOG signal patterns are analysed 
in fixed sized windows. The results have identified 
that under inattention the EOG waveforms report an 
increased mean and standard deviation values than 
concentration type of involvement. Off-screen type 
of involvement was easily distinguished by higher 
magnitude EOG signal waveforms and low GSR 
mean values.

Apart from the involvement types, the results 
have also shown the significance of having auditory 
content in addition to visual content in a multimedia 
interaction in improving the human involvement. 
However, for a robust conclusion more focused 
research work is required to identify the correlation 
between different media types and resulting types of 
involvement.

The work reported in this paper has considered 
only limited psychological factors for its work. For 
a more complete investigation, consideration of 
psychological factors, such as gender differences, 
age and cultural aspects are also required. Moreover, 
our experiments were conducted using low cost 
hardware/software having many limitations. 
Although, low cost hardware/software is more 
realistic when the practical use is considered, on 
the negative side it hinders the ability to identify 
more psychophysiological patterns with respect to 
human involvement in multimedia interactions. This 
was evident from the GSR signals recorded for the 
participant C, where the readings did not have much 
variance.

As a future continuation of this work, an application, 
such as for e-Learning, can be developed having 
the capability to determine the user’s involvement 
and to dynamically change the presentation to give 
the human a pleasant multimedia experience while 
avoiding negative psychological conditions, such as 
boredom and fatigue.

aCkNOWleDgmeNT
The authors wish to sincerely thank all those who 

supported and participated in the experiments.

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20                                                       Hiran B. Ekanayake, Damitha D. Karunarathna and Kamalanath P. Hewagamage                                                        

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