Development of Easy Attachable Biological Information Measurement Device for Various Head Mounted Displays

It is important to measure the user's biological information when experiencing virtual reality (VR) content. By measuring such biological information during a VR stimulation, the body's response to the stimulation can be verified. In addition, it is possible to change the stimulation interactively by estimating the feeling from the measured biological information. However, the user load required to mount the sensor for biological information sensing under the existing VR content experience is significant, and the noise due to body movement is also a problem. In this paper, a biometric device that can be mounted on a head mounted display (HMD) was developed. Because an HMD is attached strongly to the face, it is thought to be robust to body movement and thus the mounting load of the sensor can be ignored. The developed device can simply be mounted on an HMD. A pulse waveform can be acquired from the optical pulse wave sensor arranged on the nose side of the HMD, and the respiration waveform can be acquired from a thermopile arranged in the nostril area of the HMD. We condacted the experiment to verified that a pulse wave and the respiration can be measured with sufficient accuracy for a calculation of the tension and excitement of the user. As a result of the experiment, it was confirmed that the pulse wave can be measured with an error of less than 1% in nine out of 14 users and that the respiration can be measured with an error of 0.6% if user does not move. The respiration was measured with high accuracy regardless of the type of HMD used.