Influencing factors and mechanism of high-speed railway passenger overall comfort: Insights from source functional brain network and subjective report

Overall comfort is the priority for the high-speed railway (HSR) passengers, while its influencing factors and mechanism are not yet apparent. According to the source functional brain network and subjective report, this study revealed the potential influencing factors and mechanisms of passengers overall comfort in high-speed railway environments. Here, an ergonomics field test with 20 subjects was conducted where subjective reports and electroencephalography (EEG) were collected. The electric-source imaging and functional connectivity were used to build the source functional brain network from EEG and network indices were extracted. Statistics analysis results showed that static comfort played the most critical role in the overall comfort, followed by emotional valence, emotional arousal, aural pressure comfort, vibration comfort, and noise comfort. Thermal and visual comfort were insignificant due to the well-designed heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) and lighting system of HSR. In addition, the source functional brain network of passengers who felt uncomfortable had the higher clustering coefficient, assortativity coefficient and global efficiency, which meant greater activation of brain compared with passengers who were in a state of comfort. According to the local attributes indices analysis, most key brain regions were located in the frontal and hippocampus, which revealed emotion and spatial perception contribute to the whole comfort degradation process. This work proposed novel insights into HSR passengers overall comfort according to subjective and objective methods. Our findings demonstrate emotional regulation and seat improvements are key factors for future improvement of HSR passengers overall comfort.