Estimating Workload from Heart Rate and Game Precision in Exergames

Exergames aim to improve or maintain the user's physical and mental performance. However, to ensure an effective training while standing, users should be in a flow state in which they do not feel any effort or strain. For this purpose, the game should adapt to the player's emotional state. Therefore, a study is conducted to this treatise measuring workload and emotional state using heart rate and achieved hit accuracy at different difficulty levels to test the feasibility of these measurements in exergames. The discretely measurable data are combined with subjective assessments of users to gain insight into a correlation with individually perceived workload. A user study is adjoined in which a significant correlation (p<0.05) between the objective data (heart rate and error rate) and the subjective gaming experience can be observed. In addition, statistically significant differences are found between difficulty levels and data.