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Measuring Immersion in Experiences with Biosensors - Preparation for International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies

When people are engaged in an immersive task or experience, they can become so absorbed in it that they lose track of time and place. Narrative transportation, has similar effects, producing meaningful psychological responses and influencing behavior. Those seeking to create immersive experiences typically rely on inaccurate self-report to measure immersion. We describe research from our group on the neuroscience of immersion and our development of a physiologic sensor, algorithm, and software suite that measures immersion. Our studies show that immersion predicts enjoyment, recall of information, and actions after an experience with 75%-95%% accuracy depending on the outcome measure. We discuss the trade-offs when developing sensor technologies designed for non-laboratory environments. 1 WHAT IS IMMERSION? Immersion, an experience of deep involvement with an aspect of the environment, is a psychological and neurological process that is not well understood but has very strong and meaningful implications in everyday life. The concept of immersion has its roots in prehistory as bands of homo sapiens related stories of hunts and travels in order to instruct and perhaps entertain members of their clans. Aristotle's two great books, Poetics and Rhetoric lay the theoretical foundation for immersion. While Poetics created a structure for a dramatic play or narrative reading to have an emotional impact on audiences, Rhetoric identifies how a speaker can persuade others by structuring his or her narrative. Combining these two approaches led to the development of the dramatic arc used in nearly all storytelling. The five parts of the dramatic arc (exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and dénouement) were meant to transport audiences into the narrative so they would experience a simulacrum of the story. In the 1990s, psychologists coined the term "narrative transportation" and showed that a key aspect of transportation occurred when an audience member empathized with story characters (Gerrig, 1993). Empathy for characters can persuade audiences to change their attitudes and opinions. For many viewers, watching the physical training the boxing movie Rocky or the self-sacrifice in the film about the Battle of Thermopylae, 300, combined with an emotionally-compelling reason for the suffering, motivated audience members to join a gym or take up boxing or enroll in a boot camp-type training program. Immersion is similar to "flow" (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997), a state of concentration or absorption in an activity, like work or performance. While flow states require an active participation in a task, immersive experiences can be purely passive, but have similar positive psychological effects like deep concentration and feelings of awe or transcendence. Immersion encompasses the concept of flow, defining it beyond active boundaries to include passive experiences like transportation in a story. Herein, we present a review of the work we have done to quantify individual and group immersion using commercial wearable sensors. Zak, P. and Barraza, J. Measuring Immersion in Experiences with Biosensors Preparation for International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies. DOI: 10.5220/0006758203030307 In Proceedings of the 11th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2018) Volume 4: BIOSIGNALS, pages 303-307 ISBN: 978-989-758-279-0 Copyright © 2018 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved 303 2 WHY SHOULD WE MEASURE