The use of bespoke wearables to investigate neurological and physiological responses to microclimate stressors in quasi-formal academic contexts

Abstract: Climate change caused by anthropogenic environmental pollution has become one of the most pressing issues of our modern world. For instance, heat waves have been shown to seriously impair students’ health and productivity (Lala & Hagishima, 2023). The general problem of climate change has influenced recent research to focus on redesigning and restructuring the living environment to improve human health and productivity. Yet, according to Palme and Salvati (2021), there have been relatively few studies on the relationships between microclimates and human health and emotions. This is particularly detrimental as the in-depth knowledge obtained can be used to enhance human health and productivity, as well as influence their attitude towards the environment (Doell et al., 2023). This paper reports a study conducted by students as an independent research project under the mentorship of a senior research scientist at the National Institute of Education, Singapore. It represents a multidisciplinary, citizen science and neuroergonomic approach to investigate the relationships between human neuro-physiological health and mental well-being. To investigate both physical health as well as stress, low-cost, bespoken wearables were built, such as a mini weather station and physiological wristband. Electrodermal activity (EDA) was also introduced as a non-invasive method to detect stress and emotional arousal (Rahma et al., 2022) and as a marker of sympathetic network activity (Zangróniz et al., 2017). EDA features such as mean of tonic component and TVSymp (spectral powers in specific frequency bands according to Posada-Quintero et al. (2016a; 2016b) and their normalised versions were focused on as they were found to be highly sensitive to orthostatic, cognitive, and physical stress (Posada-Quintero et al., 2020). PPG was also introduced as a second source of data for analysis of stress and emotions, since it is influenced by the cardiac, vascular and autonomic nervous systems, which are all affected by stress. Machine learning models were trained to investigate relationships between emotional arousal, stress and the surrounding environment. To elaborate, climate change might precipitate changes to microclimates to the extent that for those inhabiting these biomes the changes might be detrimental to physical and mental well-being. Therefore, investigating EDA data may unveil hidden relationships as to how microclimate is related to our perception of well-being at a granular level. In this way, the present study builds on prior work (eg, Lim et al., 2022) that documented changes in microclimate on affective states. It is hoped that analyses of EDA and PPG data will further strengthen the emerging model describing the intersections between local microclimate, physiological stress and emotion. In the present study, we apply this paradigm to the use of EDA in the context of students’ scholastic activity. We seek to understand factors influencing the affective states of learners. Our preliminary findings suggest implications for the design of living and studying conditions with respect to the interaction of microclimate and human health and comfort.

Keywords: Microclimate Stress, Wearables, Maker Culture, Electrodermal Activity, Photoplethysmography (Ppg)

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1004749

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