EVALUATION OF USER’S EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE THROUGH NEUROLOGICAL AND PHYSIOLOGICAL MEASURES IN PLAYING SERIOUS GAMES

Abstract

The importance of evaluating user experience (UX) for different types of application is increasing gradually and so are the varieties of methods of UX evaluation. Among various application context, interactive and entertaining computing systems are one of the dominant application context these days. In order to keep the interactive computing and entertaining systems sustainable in business, satisfying the user needs is a must, while UX evaluation plays a vital role in this respect. Again, user experience of gaming context as a part of interactive entertaining system is largely impacted by users’ emotions. Among various types of games, serious game is a particular type which provides some purpose along with common gaming entertainment; for example, a simulation game for healthcare training program. The existing literature shows that UX evaluation of serious games are mostly carried out using subjective methods (questionnaires, survey). Thus, the objectives of this thesis are firstly, to show how objective methods (neurological and physiological measures) can be used to infer users’ emotional experience. Secondly, whether there exists any correlation between neurological and physiological measures. To attain these objectives, a machine learning­based approach considering both the neurological and physiological measures is proposed to evaluate the users’ emotions (UX) while playing serious game. The proposed approach is simulated through an experimental study with 25 participants to evaluate UX of an educational serious game –‘Programming Hero’. The finding of the study indicates that neurological and physiological measures can infer users’ emotions as well as a correlation exists to some extent between neurological and physiological data while evaluating UX of serious games.