Listen to Your Heart Rate: Counting the Cost of Media Quality

Videoconferencing over the Internet is developing into a valuable communicative tool, therefore assessment methods allowing users’ requirements to be determined and accounted for in the design of applications are vital. Subjective rating scales are mainly used to assess whether multimedia quality is sufficient for a particular task, however relying on this method alone has drawbacks. Therefore, we are investigating the use of objective methods to assess the user cost of different levels of multimedia quality: physiological indicators of stress are being measured. Two aims of this research are 1) to determine the optimum and minimum levels of quality which different users require for performing different tasks without significant user cost and 2) to produce a utility function which will allow the application to receive physiological feedback on the user.

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