Towards a Comprehensive Study of Fatigue Deducing Techniques for Evaluating the Quality of Experience of Haptic-Visual Applications

Abstract

With the advancement of cellular communications and the achievement of 5th Generation (5G) mobile networks, a new class of multimedia systems, refereed to as the Tactile Internet, is becoming more prominent. Consequently, regular multimedia will move from a traditional audiovisual application towards a fully immersed haptic enabled system that allows people, not only to see and hear, but eventuality to naturally interact with the physical and virtual multimedia environment by using several bidirectional and parallel artificial (Tactile and Kinesthetic) modalities. One common problem regarding a haptic-based application is fatigue. Undesirable muscular fatigue decreases the overall Quality of Experience (QoE) of such systems. Detecting and quantifying fatigue is the first procedure in rectifying this matter. In this paper, we extended our previous work to provide a comprehensive study to measure the induced fatigue from performing repetitive haptic tasks. More precisely, we present an experimental study to optimize objective fatigue evaluation in the haptic domain based on analyzing the median and mean frequencies (MDF and MNF) attributes of the subject's Surface Electromyogram(sEMG) power spectrum signals. The outcome of the study found a significant correlation between users perceived fatigue and the objective sEMG calculation with a substantial advantage to MDF over MNF.