Listen to Your Heart Rate: Counting the Cost of Media Quality

Networked multimedia applications, such as videoconferencing, offer great communicative opportunities. Since the financial cost of using such a service increases in line with the quality of the audio and video delivered, it is important to have assessment methods to accurately determine the level of quality a user group requires for a particular task. Currently, subjective rating scales are mainly used to assess whether multimedia quality is sufficient for a particular task, but this method alone has drawbacks. We argue that objective methods of user cost (such as stress) should be taken into account, and examine users’ physiological responses to determine the impact of different levels of multimedia quality on the user. The aims of this research are 1) to determine the optimum and minimum levels of quality which different users require for performing different tasks without significant user cost; and 2) to produce a utility function which will allow systems to adapt according to phy...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1999
• Where: IWAI
• Authors: Gillian M. Wilson, Martina Angela Sasse
• Keywords: Human Computer Interaction, IWAI 1999, Multimedia Quality, Particular Task, User Cost