Biological Sensor Fusion Using Sensor Reliability Evaluation for Situation Assesment

In Web-based CSCW (Computer-Supported Cooperative Work), remote members communicate their intentions in cyberspace. However, different from face-to-face communication, partners' situations including their interest, concentration, boredom, and tiredness cannot be easily transmitted. Oversight and mishearing of remote partners is often overlooked. Besides, it is further difficult to understand their real intentions sufficiently. To overcome these problems, biological sensor fusion for dependable Web-based CSCW Systems is proposed. This assesses or estimates situations of remote users through fusing information of multiple biological sensors and the related general contexts. By transmitting and using information of estimated users' situations, the system augments the cyberspace through stressing or providing warnings by multimedia. This paper clarifies the mechanism of sensor fusion engine that uses probabilistic or statistical data to increase estimation reliability and can learn from log data of feature vectors or symptoms to decrease knowledge acquisition bottleneck. The proposed method aims at improving reliability of situation estimation by evaluating the reliability and feed-backing the evaluation results by information requests. The reliability of the output on each process layer is evaluated based on the past log and related information. Based on the evaluated reliability, estimated situations are improved by information request to related sensors.