Measuring the degree of content immersion in a nonexperimental environment using a portable EEG device

As mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet PCs become more popular, users are becoming accustomed to consuming a massive amount of multimedia content every day without time or space limitations. From the industry, the need for user satisfaction investigation has consequently emerged. Conventional methods to investigate user satisfaction usually employ user feedback surveys or interviews, which are considered manual, subjective, and inefficient. Therefore, the authors focus on a more objective method of investigating users' brainwaves to measure how much they enjoy their content. Particularly for multimedia content, it is natural that users will be immersed in the played content if they are satisfied with it. In this paper, the authors propose a method of using a portable and dry electroencephalogram (EEG) sensor device to overcome the limitations of the existing conventional methods and to further advance existing EEG-based studies. The proposed method uses a portable EEG sensor device that has a small, dry (i.e., not wet or adhesive), and simple sensor using a single channel, because the authors assume mobile device environments where users consider the features of portability and usability to be important. This paper presents how to measure attention, gauge and compute a score of user's content immersion level after addressing some technical details related to adopting the portable EEG sensor device. Lastly, via an experiment, the authors verified a meaningful correlation between the computed scores and the actual user satisfaction scores.