Heart rate monitoring by a pulse sensor embedded game controller

If player condition during video game playing could be measured in real time, it would become possible to develop a new game interaction system. Since heart rate (HR) has been used for various psychological state estimation, it can be used for player condition estimation. The present work consists of two parts: the development of a new game controller that can measure player HR naturally based on a photoplethysmogram (PPG), and simultaneous monitoring of player condition by using the newly developed game controller. The experiment result demonstrated that the newly developed game controller could measure the player HR with sufficiently high accuracy. In addition, it showed that the correlation coefficient between HR and the game score varied according to player condition. This indicates that player condition during video game could be estimated by monitoring HR and the game score simultaneously.