Biofeedback Training with EmoPoker: Controlling
Emotional Arousal for Better Poker Play
Tetsuo Yamabe, Ilkka Kosunen, Inger Ekman, Lassi A. Liikkanen, Kai Kuikkaniemi, Tatsuo NakajimaDept. of Computer Science, Waseda University, JapanHelsinki Institute for Information Technology, FinlandCenter for Knowledge and Innovation Research, Aalto University, Finland{yamabe, tatsuo}@dcl.info.waseda.ac.jp, {ilkka.kosunen, lassi.liikkanen, kai.kuikkaniemi}@hiit.fi, inger.ekman@hse.fi

ABSTRACTA game of poker is a typical example of a situation involving
inperfect information: players have to make decisions underuncertainty. This uncertainty can evoke emotional arousal andlead the player to make irrational decisions. In this paper, we
introduce the EmoPoker system, which aims at making the playeraware of the arousal level by providing biofeedback. With theEmoPoker system, we expect that a poker player becomes able tocontrol their own arousal, consequently improving their gaming
performance. EmoPoker presents itself as an augmented reality
application, and its design is based on the traditional gameconcept. In this paper we also introduce other possible use casesof biofeedback training.

Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.1.2 [Information Systems]: User/Machine Systems – Humanfactors. H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation] User
Interfaces – Training, help, and documentation, Prototyping,
K.8.0 [Personal Computing]: General – Games.

General Terms
Design, Experimentation, Human Factors.

Keywords
Poker, biosignals, biofeedback, sonification, decision-making,emotional arousal , augmented traditional game environments.

1. INTRODUCTION
Poker is one of the most popular card games and it is often playedfor gambling. It maintains an element of chance because it is animperfect information game: except for own hand cards, most of
the cards are hidden from a player. A poker player needs to makedecisions under uncertainty, such as changing cards, raising a bet
and discarding a hand. Like other gambling games, thisuncertainty can evoke the mixed feelings of excitement andanxiety. This makes poker play tightly linked with emotionalarousal. For example, Kallinen et al. [4] examined
psychophysiological responses to a poker game. They measured
Authors own the copyright to their own work. Permission to makedigital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom
use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or
distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear thisnotice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, orrepublish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires priorspecific permission and/or a fee.

the level of arousal from SCL (skin conductance level), attention
from HR (heart rate), and positive/negative emotion from facial
EMG (electromyography) activity focusing especially on
differences between specific events in Texas Hold'em poker (e.g.,"All-in", "Fold", and "Win"). Their experimental results showedthat specific game events elicited significant psychophysiologicalresponses. For example, positive emotion, higher attention andhigher arousal were observed after a player went All-in (i.e., bet
all the money).
Beyond luck, poker requires skill. For instance, understanding
probabilities and logical strategies facilitate effective poker play.
However, as the common term ''poker face'' indicates, controlling
one’s own emotions is also an important skill. In addition to theinformation apparent on a table (e.g. discarded cards, amount oftips), the player’s behavior can give clues as to the contents of hisor her hand. Moreover, as learned from studies in behavioral
psychology and behavior economics, emotional arousal increases
the amount of irrational decision making [1]. This is a remarkablefact to consider when looking at gambling, since we also easilyget emotionally excited in unpredictable economic activities [5].
Thus even if a player prepares a well-formulated strategy, thestrategy might fail as the consequence of the emotions elicited by
the game. Moreover, even when a poker player understands theimportance of arousal control, it is difficult to objectively andcalmly assess how aroused one is while playing. Especially novice
players may have a hard time paying enough attention to theiremotions, as their cognitive resources are occupied by thedemands of the game strategy.
In this paper, we introduce the EmoPoker system. It aims at
supporting conscious control of emotional arousal for better
gameplay. Normally the player does not have a way to objectively
observe and quantify arousal level. EmoPoker provides
biofeedback as an easy-to-check indicator to recognize andunderstand a player’s mental state. As a first step, we aredeveloping auditory biofeedback that is dynamically controlled
based on psychophysiological information. For example, heart
rate is sonified by a heart beating sound through earphones, andseveral parameters of the tone (e.g., tempo, pitch and volume) arechanged according to realtime HR data measured from the player.
EmoPoker is designed to support rather a traditional game stylethan a digitalized video poker. Thus, in addition to the selftraining purpose, players can also enjoy poker with other playfulfeatures.

2. SYSTEM DESIGNAs mentioned above, techniques inherent in humancommunication such as a bluff are important in poker play, as
well as calculating the probability of winning hand. Therefore,instead of targeting video poker, we referred to conventional
tangible poker play.
Our system is designed as an augmented traditional gameenvironment [2]-[3]. The traditional game augmentation aims atadding new value and playful features to the traditional game withkeeping its original look-and-feel. For example, game objects (e.g.,dealt cards in poker, and chessmen in chess) can be tracked byadding RFID (radio frequency identification) tags. An object
tracking system also enables recording game events automaticallyso that players can review the gaming process, strategy andexcited scenes after the game finishes. In this case, object
monitoring is conducted automatically. Thus, players canconcentrate on playing the game as usual. EmoPoker is also
designed to be an instructional aide. Another merit of thisapproach is that the players can dynamically and seamlessly turnon and off the feedback support while gaming. It is desired thatthe self-training effect remains after removing the system support.
Since the EmoPoker system works based on an original poker
gaming environment, players can seamlessly proceed to a practicephase from the training phase, and vise versa.
As illustrated in Figure 1, EmoPoker consists of four main
components: a PC, sensors, actuators, and conventional poker
items (e.g., table, chips, and cards).

players and novices. For example, if only the skillful players’
arousal levels are disclosed in the shared visual feedback, novices
can use this hint to distinguish whether the experts are bluffing ornot. Visual feedback is also used to guide the gaming process.
Poker rules are sometimes complicated for novices. EmoPoker
can project guiding information onto the table, such as the dealer
and the round’s minimum bet, etc.
The EmoPoker system runs on a conventional PC, and it receives
and analyzes physiological data transmitted from thephysiological sensor. The PC is also connected to RFID readers sothat identified card position is restored to a database. We use an
open source poker software PokerTH1 as the game’s logic engine.

3. FUTURE WORK
Currently we proceed with two tracks in this project: EmoPoker
system development and experimentally testing the sonification
design. Whereas EmoPoker has lots of potential use cases, we areparticularly interested in how the technology can improve poker
players’ game performance by providing biofeedback. Thus, inparallel to the system development, we are planning to conduct auser study for experimentally assessing the following questions:
How does a sonified heart beat contribute to calming down aplayer’s emotional arousal?, and How does biofeedback affectgaming performance?. In order to evaluate the effects ofbiofeedback, a video poker system (i.e., modified PokerTH) wasprepared. The user study will be conducted as a controlledexperiment. Based on the experimental results, we will discuss aneffective sonification design for the tilted brain, as well as what
physiological data is most useful for sonification purposes.
Moreover, even it is well recognized that emotional arousal
affects decision-making process, the question of whether anindicator of emotional arousal improves gaming performance has
not been validated yet. Thus, a study addressing this hypothesis
will provide valuable information for EmoPoker development, inparticular, and also other forms of biofeedback training.

4. REFERENCES[1] Ariely, D. and Loewenstein, G. 2006. The Heat of theMoment: The Effect of Sexual Arousal on Sexual Decision
Making. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making. 19 87-98.
Figure 1. EmoPoker system overview
Wearable sensors, such as a wireless heart rate sensor, are used tomonitor players’ physiological state. RFID readers and tags areused to track card moves on the table. The readers are embedded
into the table, and thin tags are put on the cards’ face side (i.e.,
face-down cards are indistinguishable). Actuators are used toprovide auditory and/or visual feedback to the poker players. For
example, the heart beating sound is played by a mobile device.
Such audio feedback could be shared among players, but in the
self-training scenario, an individual player is assumed to belistening to the sound through earphones. It is also possible toprovide individual visual feedback on the mobile phone (e.g.,heart rate transition as an animation graph).
A projector is used to display shared visual feedback to all players.
In addition to audio feedback, arousal level can be conveyedvisually. For example, when a player gets excited, EmoPoker
spotlights them with ambient red light. In this case, players sharethe visual information, so this feature simply invents anotherpoker playing style (i.e., system reveals poker face). This could
also be a way to introduce a balancing factor between skillful[2] Hinske, S. and Langheinrich, M. 2009. W41K: digitallyaugmenting traditional game environments. In Proceedingsof the 3rd international Conference on Tangible andEmbedded interaction. TEI '09. ACM, NY, 99-106.
[3] Iwata, T., Yamabe, T., Polojärvi, M., and Nakajima, T. 2010.
Traditional games meet ICT: a case study on go gameaugmentation. In Proceedings of the Fourth international
Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied
interaction. TEI '10. ACM, NY, 237-240.
[4] Kallinen, K., Salminen, M., Ravaja, N., Yanev, K. 2009.
Psychophysiological responses to online poker game. IADISInternational Conference and Entertainment Technologies
2009[5] Wulfert, E., Franco, C., Williams, K., Roland, B., Maxson, J.
H. 2008. The role of money in the excitement of gambling.
Psychology of Addictive Behaviors. Vol 22(3), Sep 2008,380-390.
1

http://www.pokerth.net/