Publications by authors named "Rahul D Gavas"

Active visual attention (AVA) is the cognitive ability that helps to focus on important visual information while responding to a stimulus and is important for human-behavior and psychophysiological research. Existing eye-trackers/camera-based methods are either expensive or impose privacy issues as face videos are recorded for analysis. Proposed approach using blink-rate variability (BRV), is inexpensive, easy to implement, efficient and handles privacy issues, making it amenable to real-time applications.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study focuses on the Photoplethysmogram (PPG) signal, which is important for assessing various health parameters like heart rate and blood pressure, but requires high-quality signals to be accurate.
  • It addresses the challenge of muscle artifacts in PPG signals from fitness devices and smartphones, highlighting the need for a signal quality assessment before analysis.
  • The authors propose an efficient quality-checking algorithm suitable for edge devices, such as smartwatches, which has shown high accuracy in noisy environments and improved heart rate calculations in smartphone applications.
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Eye blink is indicative of various mental states. Generally, vision based approaches are used for detecting eye blinks. However, performance of such approaches varies across participants.

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Tunes perceived as happy may help a user reach an affective state of positive valence. However, a user with negative valence may not be ready to listen to such a tune immediately. In this paper, we consider nudging a user from their current affective state to a target affective state in small steps.

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Non-invasive means of monitoring mild cognitive impairments (MCI) is recently gaining popularity. With the advent of easy to use physiological sensors, there have been an outburst of studies from the last decade which aim at detecting a target's mental health condition. However, not many studies present the experience or insights gained from carrying out such in-situ research work, particularly when working with older adults.

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This paper focuses on a new algorithm for solving optimization problems using the nature of food search behaviour of caterpillars. The paper describes how the periscopic, pheromonic and fractal search properties analogous to the caterpillars, can aid in designing a new optimization algorithm. The performance characteristics of the new method is compared using 26 standard test functions and the area under the curve of the fitness evaluations is used to validate and compare the proposed algorithms against existing related works.

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Analysis of tremor signal is a crucial part in the study of Parkinsonian subject, specially to understand effectiveness of treatment and progression of disease. Aim of this paper is to segregate the effects of Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) and medicinal components from Parkinson's disease (PD) tremor signal. Tremor signal has multiple effects embedded in a single channel and identifying the hidden components from it is a challenging process.

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The Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) protocol is a widely accepted method of inducing social and/or cognitive stress in participants and studying its effects. Traditionally, this protocol is administered in laboratory or university settings, which are less formal than in offices. In this paper, we report the results of the analysis of multi-modal sensor data collected from employees of an enterprise who underwent the test.

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Analysis of cognitive functioning from gaze behavior might serve as an early indicator of age related decline of cognitive functions. Standard psychological tests like the digit-symbol substitution test or the symbol-digit modalities test is used exclusively in this regard. In this paper, we have designed and developed a digitized version of the digit symbol substitution test.

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Cognitive impairments or dysfunctions are one of the major issues of aging population and medical conditions like brain damage, stroke etc. Assessment of cognitive functioning is usually done by medical practitioners using various standard psychological tests which require expert interventions. In the present study we have tried to use eye tracking as a possible option for assessment of cognitive functions while executing a digitized digit symbol substitution task.

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Eye tracking is one of the most widely used technique for assessment, screening and human-machine interaction related applications. There are certain issues which limit the usage of eye trackers in practical scenarios, viz., i) need to perform multiple calibrations and ii) presence of inherent noise in the recorded data.

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