Measuring Photoplethysmogram-Based Stress-Induced Vascular Response Index to Assess Cognitive Load and Stress

Abstract

Quantitative assessment for cognitive load and mental stress is very important in optimizing human-computer system designs to improve performance and efficiency. Traditional physiological measures, such as heart rate variation (HRV), blood pressure and electrodermal activity (EDA), are widely used but still have limitations in sensitivity, reliability and usability. In this study, we propose a novel photoplethysmogram-based stress induced vascular index (sVRI) to measure cognitive load and stress. We also provide the basic methodology and detailed algorithm framework. We employed a classic experiment with three levels of task difficulty and three stages of testing period to verify the new measure. Compared with the blood pressure, heart rate and HRV components recorded simultaneously, the sVRI reached the same level of significance on the effect of task difficulty/period as the most significant other measure. Our findings showed sVRI's potential as a sensitive, reliable and usable parameter.