  It has recently become increasingly important to measure the cognitive load
of developers. This is because continuing with a development under a high
cognitive load may cause human errors. Therefore, to automatically measure the
cognitive load, existing studies have used biometric measures such as brain
waves and the heart rate. However, developers are often required to equip
certain devices when measuring them, and can therefore be physically burdened.
In this study, we evaluated the feasibility of non-invasive biometric measures
based on the nasal skin temperature. The nasal skin temperature has been widely
used in other fields to measure mental status. In the present experiment, the
subjects created small Java programs, and we estimated their cognitive load
using the proposed biometric measures based on the nasal skin temperature. As a
result, the proposed biometric measures were shown to be more effective than
non-biometric measures. Hence, biometric measures based on nasal skin
temperature are promising for estimating the cognitive load of developers.
