Physiological responses to error amplification in a robotic reaching adaptation task

Analysis of physiological responses provides an objective measure of a person's affective state and has been proposed as a way to evaluate motivation and engagement of therapy clients during robot-assisted therapy regimens. This paper presents the analysis of three physiological responses to different levels of error amplification in a robotic reaching task to understand the feasibility of using physiological signals in order to modify therapy exercises to achieve higher participant attentiveness. In a pilot study with 22 healthy participants, we analyzed skin conductance, skin temperature, and respiration signals, with two main goals: 1) to compare physiological parameters between baseline (rest) and error-amplified reaching motion periods; and 2) to compare physiological parameters between reaching motion periods with different levels of error amplification. Results show that features extracted from skin conductance and respiration signals show significant differences between different error amplification levels. Features extracted from the skin temperature signal are not as reliable as measures of skin conductance and respiration, however they can provide supplementary information.