Unobtrusive Physiological and Gesture Wearable Acquisition System: A Preliminary Study on Behavioral and Emotional Correlations

This study proposes an integrated wireless wearable system, that provides relevant information on gesture and electrodermal responses for affective communication investigations. The system is designed to be comfortable and unobtrusive to be used in immersive virtual realities as well as in actual scenarios in order to acquire implicit and explicit affective information. The system is comprised of a glove where textile electrodes, deformation sensors, and an inertial motion unit are integrated. The glove simultaneously acquires electrodermal activity and gesture, providing pre-elaborated signals that will be used for feature extraction purpose in emotion recognition filed. Preliminary results are reliable and promising for the complete integration of affective motion and physiological signal contents. This prototype is useful to investigate how humans perceive and produce affective interactions. Moreover, this prototype could be used for designing novel emotional models based on high-level and largely-comprehensive affective information.