11.13.06
mini-review: Regan Mandryk's stuff
Regan Mandryk did a way cool PhD where she figured out how to identify various emotions/mental states — fun, excitement, boredom, challenge, and frustration — from physiological measurements.
She stuck sensors on guys playing video games to measure things like heart rate, galvanic skin response, etc. She asked them to report on their feelings during the game play, and with a small application of fuzzy logic, was able to tease out the correlations between the sensor data and emotions. Cool stuff. (See Regan’s thesis or a terser summary of her work.)
It might be interesting to stick electrodes on people coding; there is all kinds of interesting stuff you could pull out of that. Combine the sensor traces with traces of interactions with an IDE, and see where the IDE is frustrating the coders. See if you can identify “flow”. See what happens when you interrupt flow. See how long it takes to get back into flow from various types of interruption. Figure out how to get people into flow.
