Search results

This paper aims to concentrate on recent innovations in flexible wearable sensor technology tailored for monitoring vital signals within the contexts of wearable sensors and systems developed specifically for monitoring health and fitness metrics.

In recent decades, wearable sensors for monitoring vital signals in sports and health have advanced greatly. Vital signals include electrocardiogram, electroencephalogram, electromyography, inertial data, body motions, cardiac rate and bodily fluids like blood and sweating, making them a good choice for sensing devices.

This report reviewed reputable journal articles on wearable sensors for vital signal monitoring, focusing on multimode and integrated multi-dimensional capabilities like structure, accuracy and nature of the devices, which may offer a more versatile and comprehensive solution.

The paper provides essential information on the present obstacles and challenges in this domain and provide a glimpse into the future directions of wearable sensors for the detection of these crucial signals. Importantly, it is evident that the integration of modern fabricating techniques, stretchable electronic devices, the Internet of Things and the application of artificial intelligence algorithms has significantly improved the capacity to efficiently monitor and leverage these signals for human health monitoring, including disease prediction.

Strategic decisions leaders make involving organizational changes such as mergers and acquisitions (M&A), divestitures, and downsizing, which can influence and/or interact with other organizational factors. For example, within the context of M&A, changes impact financial performance, firm behaviors, and organizational culture. In addition, strategic decisions for these types of change can also interrelate with other more intrapersonal factors, including both leaders’ and employees’ health and well-being. Employee stress, also referred to as “merger syndrome,” outlines individual negative impacts of the changes including, but not limited to, cynicism and distrust, change wariness, and burnout, all accumulating to psychological effects including increases in detachment to work, stress, and sick leave. In this chapter, the authors outline the different impacts M&A phases have on stress and well-being and how they interrelate with the strategic decisions leaders make. The authors also outline future research opportunities and practical implications for how leaders and employees could better manage future major changes such as M&A activities.

This study aims to explore the effect of different volumes of indoor greenery on perceived stress, stress, perceived productivity, productivity and perceived workplace satisfaction to support employees’ well-being.

In a cross-over experimental design, a homogeneous group of students was randomised in different orders where each participant experienced the same three conditions. Different volumes of indoor greenery were added to the experiment room (0%, 0.5% and 8%). With a Fitbit, sudoku and a questionnaire, the five variables were measured.

Findings show that perceived stress and heart rate (physical stress) are lower in the 8% condition. Productivity scores did not improve significantly, however perceived productivity did in the 8% condition. Positive trends could be seen for the variables in the 0.5% condition. Furthermore, 2/3 of the participants preferred the 8% condition, whereas the other 1/3 preferred the 0.5% condition. Overall, 1/3 of the participants mentioned that their optimal volume of greenery would be more than 0.5% but less than 8%. This research shows that the implementation of 8% indoor greenery contributes to a happier and more relaxing office place where employees get the feeling of being less stressed and more productive.

This research found that the largest volume of plants used (8%) has the most positive effect on the variables studied in this research. This study shows that participants’ heart rate, and therefore physical stress, became lower in the 8% condition. In this 8% condition, participants experienced less stress and perceived themselves to be more productive. Besides, 2/3 of the participants preferred being in the 8% condition, suggesting that after adding this volume of indoor greenery employees will be more satisfied with their workplace.

Where previous research discovered that indoor greenery has a positive effect on variables like (perceived) stress, (perceived) productivity and perceived workplace satisfaction, this research also provides support for the effect of different volumes of indoor greenery. Results obtained by the spatial coverage ratio approach can be easily applied to future research and practice.

Indoor greenery can contribute to making the office a happier and more relaxing place where employees get the feeling of being less stressed and more productive which in the long term might contribute to the overall well-being of employees.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study focusing on the effect of different volumes of indoor greenery on these five variables.

Drawing on the three flow-channel model and the stimulus–organism–response model, this research aims to understand how the influence of interactivity on purchase intention is mediated by the state of flow.

This research entails a neurophysiological experiment combined with a survey-based study. This study analyzes, first, participants' heart rate variability through the parasympathetic and sympathetic indexes during five different activities, and, second, the mediating effect of flow through a structural equation model.

This study contributes to research on the role of flow in interactive marketing. The findings reveal that flow state is associated with less stressful activities, such as navigating highly interactive websites and playing online games. This research confirms the mediating effect of flow between interactivity and purchase intention.

This paper contributes to interactive marketing and flow theory by combining traditional methods with a peripheral physiological technique that draws on neuroscience. In addition, it confirms the positive but indirect effect of interactivity on purchase intention in online contexts.

Ubiquitous health-care monitoring systems can provide continuous surveillance to a person using various sensors, including wearables and implantable and fabric-woven sensors. By assessing the state of many physiological characteristics of the patient’s body, continuous monitoring can assist in preparing for the impending emergency. To address this issue, this study aims to propose a health-care system that integrates the treatment of the impending heart, stress and alcohol emergencies. For this purpose, this study uses readings from sensors used for electrocardiography, heart rate, respiration rate, blood alcohol content percentage and blood pressure of a patient’s body.

For heart status, stress level and alcohol detection, the parametric values obtained from these sensors are preprocessed and further divided into four, five and six phases, respectively. A final integrated emergency stage is derived from the stages that were interpreted to examine at a person’s state of emergency. A thorough analysis of the proposed model is carried out using four classification techniques, including decision trees, support vector machines, k nearest neighbors and ensemble classifiers. For all of the aforementioned detections, four metrics are used to evaluate performance: classification accuracy, precision, recall and fmeasure.

Eventually, results are validated against the existing health-care systems. The empirical results received reveal that the proposed model outperforms the existing health-care models in the context of metrics above for different detections taken into consideration.

This study proposes a health-care system capable of performing data processing using wearable sensors. It is of great importance for real-time systems. This study assures the originality of the proposed system.

The purpose of this study is to highlight and demonstrate how the study of stress and related responses in construction can best be measured and benchmarked effectively.

A range of perceptual and physiological measures are obtained across different time periods and during different activities in a fieldwork setting. Differences in the empirical results are analysed and implications for future studies of stress discussed.

The results of this study strongly support the use of multiple psychometrics and biosensors whenever biometrics are included in the study of stress. Perceptual, physiological and environmental factors are all shown to act in concert to impact stress. Strong conclusions on the potential drivers of stress should then only be considered when consistent results apply across multiple metrics, time periods and activities.

Stress is an incredibly complex condition. This study demonstrates why many current applications of biosensors to study stress in construction are not up to the task and provides empirical evidence on how future studies can be significantly improved.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study to focus explicitly on demonstrating the need for multiple research instruments and settings when studying stress or related conditions in construction.

This study aims to investigate the neurocognitive status of people with different moods (depressed and non-depressed) both in a typical urban environment (TUE) and in an urban green environment (UGE).

The study was conducted with the participation of 210 individuals in a real environment. Heart rates of the participants were measured together with EEG and eye-tracking measurements while they were walking in a real urban environment (TUE and UGE). The participants were divided into depressed and non-depressed groups according to different moods. Movements within the city based on these two distinctions and different cognitive moods were investigated, together with the effects of the city plan on these people.

As a result, the green urban fabric was found to have a positive effect even on people with depression. Yet, it was found that the non-depressed group also spent more time in a green urban environment.

The study shows that urban planners and designers should assume an important role in the design of green spaces, which have a more intense visual and cognitive impact than structures.

For online experiential products, tactile attributes are important but hard-to-achieve features. This research aims to explore consumers' emotional experiences by incorporating tactile attributes into the online clothing shopping scenario.

This paper presents two online shopping experiments by consumers who purchase online clothing: one experiment involves subjects browsing clothing products on a computer screen; the other one involves subjects touching the clothing fabric while browsing a corresponding product on a computer screen. Based on the stimulus–organism–response (S-O-R) model, a physiological polygraph was used to record the emotional experience of subjects under the stimuli of “sight” and “sight + touch.”

(1) Subjects had a more positive emotional arousal under the stimuli of “sight + touch”; (2) the visual merchandising of clothing and expected touch task affect subjects' overall emotional experience with clothing, and with a good visual experience and expected tactile experience, the subjects showed a more positive emotional valence under the stimuli of “sight + touch”; (3) differing from previous research, this experimental data only supports the hypothesis that the skin conductance indicator is related to the level of emotional arousal, without supporting its correlation with emotional valence. However, the heart rate indicator is correlated with emotional valence but not with emotional arousal.

This work proposes a way to study the tactile attributes of online clothing and enriches the theoretical framework of polygraph and the S-O-R model for the research of online experiential products, and in terms of application, it sheds light on sales strategies of online experiential products for retailers and brand owners.

This research analyses the searching, interacting and purchasing behavior of shoppers seeking semidurable and fast-moving consumer goods in an immersive virtual reality (VR) store, showing how physical examinations and visual inspections relate to purchases.

Around 60 participants completed two forced-purchase tasks using a head-mounted display with visual and motor-tracking systems. A second study using a pictorial display of the products complemented the VR study.

The findings indicate differences in shopping behavior for the two product categories, with semidurable goods requiring greater inspection and deliberation than fast-moving consumer goods. In addition, visual inspection of the shelf and products was greater than a physical examination through virtual handling for both product categories. The paper also presents relationships between visual inspections and product interactions during the searching stage of purchase decisions.

The research consists of two types of implicit measures in this study: eye-tracking and hand-product interactions. This study reveals the suitability of implicit measures for evaluating consumer behavior in VR stores.