Virtual Reality Adaptation Using Electrodermal Activity to Support the User Experience

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This is interesting study, well performed and properly described. But the idea and the results are quite derivative. There were some similar studies published.

I don't see anything completely new or fresh in the presented paper. Nevertheless, the article is well written and the results are interesting. My main substantive objection would be a small number of participants, which may translate into the credibility of the results.

[slight note: EEG stands for electroencephalograPHY not -GRAM]

Author Response

We thank the reviewer for the constructive feedback. Below there are our responses which we hope satisfy their comments.

Comment 1:

This is interesting study, well performed and properly described. But the idea and the results are quite derivative. There were some similar studies published.

Response 1: 

Similar studies published on physiologically-adaptive systems have been added and discussed in Section 1 and Section 6.

Comment 2:

My main substantive objection would be a small number of participants, which may translate into the credibility of the results.

Response 2: 

Sample size as a potential limitation has been added to Section 6.1

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper is titled – “Virtual Reality Adaptation using Electrodermal Activity to Support User Experience”. The work seems novel and holds the potential to advance research and innovation in this field. However, the presentation of the paper needs major improvement. It is suggested that the authors make the necessary changes/updates to their paper as per the following comments:

1. In Section 4.1 please elaborate on how the participants were recruited and what was the inclusion and exclusion criteria.
2. As the work involved human subjects please provide details about the approval from the local institutional review board (IRB) or other appropriate ethics committee that was obtained for the safety of the human subjects. Refer to the section – “Research Involving Human Subjects” at this link - https://0-www-mdpi-com.brum.beds.ac.uk/ethics#7
3. The authors mention – “Results of the analyses can be found online within the XXX platform, at this link: https://xxxanonymyzedforreview/xxx/” Please update these details as this URL does not work and this platform - "XXX" cannot be found.
4. The review of physiologically-adaptive systems (Section 2.3) needs improvement. Several recent advances in this field such as ambient technologies, pervasive systems, etc. are not even mentioned. Cite this recent paper on pervasive technologies - https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/jsan10030039 and similarly cite a few other recent papers related to the emerging technologies in this field.
5. Discussion of the results should include how the diversity characteristics (presented in Section 4.1) affected or did not affect the findings.
6. A comparison of the results with prior works in this field is missing. Please compare the findings in a quantitative and qualitative manner with prior works in this field to uphold the relevance of the findings.

Author Response

Here the reviewer can find the response to the comments which we think helped us to significantly improve the paper. We therefore thank the reviewer .

Comment 1:

In Section 4.1 please elaborate on how the participants were recruited and what was the inclusion and exclusion criteria.

Response 1: 

We recruited participants using convenient sampling, (Mailing List, Students on the campus, and Snowball sampling) and exclusion criteria were added to Section 4.1.

Comment 2:

As the work involved human subjects please provide details about the approval from the local institutional review board (IRB) or other appropriate ethics committee that was obtained for the safety of the human subjects. Refer to the section – “Research Involving Human Subjects” at this link - https://0-www-mdpi-com.brum.beds.ac.uk/ethics#7

Response 2: 

We have added a detailed section on this matter to the manuscript outlining our local ethics review procedure (Section 10).

Comment 3:

The authors mention – “Results of the analyses can be found online within the XXX platform, at this link: https://xxxanonymyzedforreview/xxx/” Please update these details as this URL does not work and this platform - "XXX" cannot be found

Response 3: 

Data availability has been updated in Section 5. We now give full access to the data and the analysis script as anonymization is no issue anymore in the hope that this will support Open Science, see https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.18419/darus-2820. 

Comment 4:

The review of physiologically-adaptive systems (Section 2.3) needs improvement. Several recent advances in this field such as ambient technologies, pervasive systems, etc. are not even mentioned. Cite this recent paper on pervasive technologies - https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/jsan10030039 and similarly cite a few other recent papers related to the emerging technologies in this field.

Response 4: 

We thank the reviewer for the constructive comment. The reference is from the pervasive systems and ambient technologies domain, which is outside the scope of this paper. Including such a wide range of technologies and applications, would make the paper unfocused and would not help the reader to focus on the contrebution. Thus, we narrowed down the contribution and reported in Section 2.3 on studies that implemented psychophysiological measures of arousal to adapt the virtual reality environment.

Comment 5:

Discussion of the results should include how the diversity characteristics (presented in Section 4.1) affected or did not affect the findings.

Response 5: 

To verify if there is any effect of participant characteristics on the results, we ran an analysis on the participants' reported gender (male and female only). Thus, we accounted for gender in the analysis which did not change our results significantly and did not change our inference. This very well conforms with the expected outcome, cf. [A]. Finally, while we can not run any valid analysis on age, due to the small sample size, based on the literature there is also no age impact to be expected in the age groups of participants recruited, cf. [B].

 [A] Freedman, L. W., Scerbo, A. S., Dawson, M. E., Raine, A., McCLURE, W. O., & Venables, P. H. (1994). The relationship of sweat gland count to electrodermal activity. Psychophysiology, 31(2), 196-200.

[B] Bari, D. S., Yacoob Aldosky, H. Y., & Martinsen, Ø. G. (2020). Simultaneous measurement of electrodermal activity components correlated with age-related differences. Journal of Biological Physics, 46(2), 177-188.

Comment 6:

A comparison of the results with prior works in this field is missing. Please compare the findings in a quantitative and qualitative manner with prior works in this field to uphold the relevance of the findings.

Response 6: 

We compared prior works in terms of subjective and behavioral results when users interacted with physiologically-adaptive systems based on ECG and EEG measures for task demand adaptation. We clarified this in Section 6.

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors have updated their paper as per all my comments and suggestions. I do not have any additional comments at this point. I recommend the publication of the paper in its current form.