A Study of Autonomic Responses due to Vehicular Speed Changes

자동차 속도 변화에 따른 자율신경계의 반응 연구

We report on some of the preliminary results of the physiological responses resulting from vehicular speed changes. Healthy human subjects (n=5) were studied for the experiments. We measured the physiological responses of the subjects such as Heart Rate Variability (HRV), Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), and skin temperature for day and night vehicular speed change experiments, respectively. Before and after the tasks, we carried out a self-report for acquiring correlation with experiment results. Mean heart rate variability (HRV) and amplitude of GSR and skin temperature were calculated for 3 minutes duration in each state. The analysis of the physiological measures of ANS activity revealed that vehicle speed change-based affective state evoked arousal response pattern featured by HR acceleration, decrease of skin temperature, and increase of GSR amplitude. The obtained results show that despite some differences observed between each state, overall physiological responses show that the activity of the sympathetic nervous system increases as a result of the increase of speed.