Investigating Biometric Response for Information Retrieval Applications

Current information retrieval systems make no measurement of the user’s response to the searching process or the information itself. Existing psychological studies show that subjects exhibit measurable physiological responses when carrying out certain tasks, e.g. when viewing images, which generally result in heightened emotional states. We find that users exhibit measurable biometric behaviour in the form of galvanic skin response when watching movies, and engaging in interactive tasks. We examine how this data might be exploited in the indexing of data for search and within the search process itself.