Toward a Mathematical Model for Quality of Experience Evaluation of Haptic Applications

There is rapid progress in the advancement of user interfaces. One such advancement is enabling the sense of touch, or haptics, as part of the interface. Haptic devices are seeing growth in many types of applications such as gaming and medical simulation. Assessing the quality of experience (QoE) of the user is necessary to evaluate how the user perceives such interfaces. The QoE is a user-centric parameter that shifts the paradigm of evaluation from the technology itself to the user. This paper proposes a mathematical-based QoE evaluation of haptic-based applications. A mathematical model that is able to quantify the QoE of the user is described. By conducting a user study in which users evaluate a haptic-based game application, we were able to test and validate the mathematical model. There are several approaches in determining the weights to be used with the mathematical model. This paper presents and compares different approaches for weight determination, namely even weight distribution, correlation-based weights, even weights-correlation combination, linear regression analysis, and principal component analysis (PCA). Our results show that PCA weight determination performs slightly better than the rest of the approaches.