The Relationship Between Mental Stress And Typing Behaviour: An Exploratory Study

In contemporary society, human's mental stress is increasingly getting higher, which would be harmful for mental and physical health. It's important to detect mental stress for preventing such harm. Existing methods of mental stress detection are intrusive and no good for long-term monitoring. Therefore, it is the purpose of this study that measuring user's mental stress through those daily human-computer interaction activities.Typing can be seen as a common and typical daily human-computer interaction activity. Previous study has shown that there is a connection between mental stress and typing behaviour. That makes it possible to detect mental stress through those daily activities. This research was originated from Interactive Systems Research Center, UMBC and was jointly conducted with Sino-European Usability Center, DLMU. The aim of this research is to explore the relationship between mental stress and typing behaviour and provide theoretical support to develop some applications in the future.Experiment method, variables and research hypothesis were identified through literature review.Totally,18 parameters, which indicate user's performance, from 40 samples under six levels of mental stress were obtained. Regression curves were established after data pre-process with SPSS. A relationship between mental stress and typing performance was partly unveiled.This paper is consisted of five chapters:Chapterâ… , research background and content; Chapterâ…¡, theory review about mental stress and behaviour; Chapterâ…¢, research hypothesis proposal and three parts of the experiment(Pre-experiment, controlled experiment, and stimuli experiment); Chapterâ…£, data collection, analysis and results; Chapterâ…¤, conclusion and discussion.