Analysis of Short-Term Subjective Well-Being/Comfort and Its Correlation to Different EEG Metrics

Finding a correlation between physiological measures and subjective well-being (SWB) or comfort has been an active research area in recent years. We focus on short-term SWB measures and their correlation to electroencephalography (EEG) signals in an office environment. We recorded EEG from 30 participants and asked them to report their SWB every 30 s. We analyzed the correlation between the relative power of different frequency bands at various sensor locations and SWB via k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) classification and linear regression. We also analyzed the correlation of the time series themselves at different sensor locations and how they can be classified into different SWB values via k-NN. Then, we tried to cluster participants into subgroups that had a similar correlation between their EEG recordings and their reported SWB. We found that a correlation between relative power and SWB also holds for short terms. However, the results of every single participant of all analyses vary substantially, and we could not find any consistent clustering into subgroups. That implies a huge individuality when it comes to EEG measures and reported short-term SWB.