Wi-Mind: Wireless Mental Effort Inference

From not disturbing a focused programmer, to entertaining a restless commuter waiting for a train, ubiquitous computing devices could greatly enhance their interaction with humans, should they only be aware of the user's cognitive load. However, current means of assessing cognitive load are, with a few exceptions, based on intrusive methods requiring physical contact of the measurement equipment and the user. In this paper we propose Wi-Mind, a system for remote cognitive load assessment through wireless sensing. Wi-Mind is based on a software-defined radio-based radar that measures sub-millimeter movements related to a person's breathing and heartbeats, which, in turn allow us to infer the person's cognitive load. We built and tested the system with 23 volunteers engaged in different tasks. Initial results show that while Wi-Mind manges to detect whether one is engaged in a cognitively demanding task, the inference of the exact cognitive load level remains challenging.