Ramya Sankar

Rena Mira Krishna, Ramya Sankar, Shadi Ghiasi

Electrodermal Activity (EDA) is a non-invasive physiological signal widely available in wearable devices and reflects sympathetic nervous system (SNS) activation. Prior multi-modal studies have demonstrated robust performance in distinguishing stress and exercise states when EDA is combined with complementary signals such as heart rate and accelerometry. However, the ability of EDA to independently distinguish sustained aerobic exercise from low-arousal states under subject-independent evaluation remains insufficiently characterized. This study investigates whether features derived exclusively from EDA can reliably differentiate rest from sustained aerobic exercise. Using a publicly available dataset collected from thirty healthy individuals, EDA features were evaluated using benchmark machine learning models with leave-one-subject-out (LOSO) validation. Across models, EDA-only classifiers achieved moderate subject-independent performance, with phasic temporal dynamics and event timing contributing to class separation. Rather than proposing EDA as a replacement for multimodal sensing, this work provides a conservative benchmark of the discriminative power of EDA alone and clarifies its role as a unimodal input for wearable activity-state inference.

Zhijiong Huang, Yu Zhang, Kathryn C. Quigley et al.

Virtual reality (VR) is an important new technology that is fun-damentally changing the way people experience entertainment and education content. Due to the fact that most currently available VR products are one size fits all, the accessibility of the content design and user interface design, even for healthy children is not well understood. It requires more research to ensure that children can have equally good user compared to adults in VR. In our study, we seek to explore accessibility of locomotion in VR between healthy adults and minors along both objective and subjective dimensions. We performed a user experience experiment where subjects completed a simple task of moving and touching underwater animals in VR using one of four different locomotion modalities, as well as real-world walking without wearing VR headsets as the baseline. Our results show that physical body movement that mirrors real-world movement exclusively is the least preferred by both adults and minors. However, within the different modalities of controller assisted locomotion there are variations between adults and minors for preference and challenge levels.