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Physiological Indicators of Mental Workload in Visual Display Terminal Work

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Advances in Physical Ergonomics and Human Factors (AHFE 2019)

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Abstract

The aim of the present study was to examine the relationship between experienced mental workload and physiological response by multi-modal data. The participants were required to perform a test simulation task that imposed varying level of mental resource demand. At the same time physiological parameters (heart interbeat intervals, electromyography, and galvanic skin response) were recorded by non-invasive wearable sensors. The subjective ratings of mental workload were also collected after the experiment. Results shown that LF/HF was significantly larger in difficult level of task than middle and easy levels but between middle and easy levels of tasks. Moreover, the average of SC was significantly larger in difficult and middle levels of tasks than the easy level but between difficult and middle levels of tasks. There were significantly positive correlations between the subjective evaluation of mental workload and LF/HF and between the subjective evaluation and behavioral performance.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 71801002, 71701003), the Humanities and Social Sciences Foundation of the Ministry of Education in China (No. 18YJC630023), the Anhui Natural Science Foundation Project (No. 1808085QG228), the Key Project for Natural Science Fund of Colleges in Anhui Province (No. KJ2017A108). We thank the research support plan from Beijing Kingfar technology CO., LTD (China) for providing related equipment and scientific and technological support. We thank all the participants for carrying out the experiments.

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Correspondence to Yaqin Cao .

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Ding, Y., Cao, Y., Wang, Y. (2020). Physiological Indicators of Mental Workload in Visual Display Terminal Work. In: Goonetilleke, R., Karwowski, W. (eds) Advances in Physical Ergonomics and Human Factors. AHFE 2019. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 967. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20142-5_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20142-5_9

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-20141-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-20142-5

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