Serious Games and Wearable Sensors

Serious games, and game technologies more generally, are becoming increasingly attractive for training and skill development in financial decision making. Wearable sensor equipment that measure pulse rates, skin-inductance, and other bio-signals allow us to discover an individual’s emotional state in particular decision situations. Eye tracking and automated event logging provides further completes this picture with behavioural profile data.

Serious games in xDelia

Computer games are interactive simulation, visualisation and sonification environments supporting a user experience. While games may be most familiar from entertainment applications, games also have a broad potential for industrial, public, commercial and health applications. The games in xDelia belong to the latter category, often called serious games, where learning is an essential element.

The nature of the games developed in xDelia varies depending on the needs and expectations of the stakeholders (traders, investors, agencies with a financial capability mandate, etc.) and the outcome from field and experimental studies. During the first stage of the project, game development and evaluation is mainly exploratory and focuses on mapping required cognitive skills, attitudinal changes, emotional engagement, or motivational goals to game play and subsequently to game design features. The games developed in this first stage are evaluated empirically in the laboratory using for instance eye tracking, EEG, or psychophysiological sensors. In the second stage games and game technologies are developed, adapted, and integrated into learning applications in novel ways.

Psychophysiological monitoring

Sensor applications in xDelia focus on the development of sensor systems for emotional state monitoring. Psychophysiological monitoring technologies provide objective information about emotional states and will be used as a research tool in order to study emotional biases in financial decision making and as a support component for game-based learning and training applications. Of particular interest for xDelia are marketable, easy-to-use monitoring solutions (sensors, instrumentation and analysis software) beyond laboratory systems which are mainly used for psychophysiological studies today. The development of wearable sensor technology can help to obtain an unobtrusive, noninvasive system which is suitable for everyday life usage.

Behavioural and psychophysiological data

In xDelia, behavioral and psychophysiological data collected via games and sensor technology serves three different purposes:

• Behavioural and emotional state data help us to broaden our knowledge about the differences in judgmental biases, emotional reactions, and self-regulation of emotion between novice and expert decision-makers.
• The collected data provides evidence of engagement with the learning game approaches developed in the project. We know for instance that ‘hot’ learning which engages emotions is more powerful than ‘cold’ learning.
• Such data can provide an important source of feedback in learning games and learning support technologies where the learning goal concerns improvements in emotion regulation or reduction in the impact of decision-biases.

To collect data not only from laboratory experiments but also from real-world monitoring besides laboratory systems we will also use wearable sensor technology.