Measurement of attention and emotion levels for human adaptive mechatronics by near infrared spectroscopy

Abstract

This paper presents a method to measure the attention and emotion levels using the near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) signals around the prefrontal cortex. The brain blood oxygen concentration over the subjects’ brains is measured by NIRS while they watch the Japanese comic Rakugo and sad videos. The analysis has been done by using the first principal component of measured signals, and the paper proposes the hypothesis to relate the power of the first principal component and its distribution function to the emotion and the attention levels. To verify the hypothesis, an analysis has been performed of experiments in which both normal and dementia subjects watch videos. This paper raises the possibility of diagnosing dementia by measuring levels of emotion and attention.