Nose Heat: Exploring Stress-induced Nasal Thermal Variability through Mobile Thermal Imaging
This work addresses the challenge of real-time stress monitoring for applications in workplace or health settings, though it appears incremental in building on existing thermal imaging methods.
The paper tackled the problem of automatically monitoring stress-induced thermal dynamics in real-world settings by using mobile thermal imaging to measure nose temperature variations, demonstrating its potential for assessing stress responses beyond controlled laboratory environments.
Automatically monitoring and quantifying stress-induced thermal dynamic information in real-world settings is an extremely important but challenging problem. In this paper, we explore whether we can use mobile thermal imaging to measure the rich physiological cues of mental stress that can be deduced from a person's nose temperature. To answer this question we build i) a framework for monitoring nasal thermal variable patterns continuously and ii) a novel set of thermal variability metrics to capture a richness of the dynamic information. We evaluated our approach in a series of studies including laboratory-based psychosocial stress-induction tasks and real-world factory settings. We demonstrate our approach has the potential for assessing stress responses beyond controlled laboratory settings.