Mental fatigue, characterized by subjective feelings of "tiredness" and "lack of energy", can degrade individual performance in a variety of situations, for example, in motor vehicle driving or while performing surgery. Thus, a method for nonintrusive monitoring of mental fatigue status is urgently needed. Recent research shows that physiological signal-based fatigue-classification methods using wearable electronics can be sufficiently accurate; by contrast, rigid, bulky devices constrain the behavior of those wearing them, potentially interfering with test signals. Recently, wearable electronics, such as epidermal electronics systems (EES) and electronic tattoos (E-tattoos), have been developed to meet the requirements for the comfortable measurement of various physiological signals. However, comfortable, effective, and nonintrusive monitoring of mental fatigue levels remains to be fulfilled. In this work, an EES is established to simultaneously detect multiple physiological signals in a comfortable and nonintrusive way. Machine-learning algorithms are employed to determine the mental fatigue levels and a predictive accuracy of up to 89% is achieved based on six different kinds of physiological features using decision tree algorithms. Furthermore, EES with the trained predictive model are applied to monitor in situ human mental fatigue levels when doing several routine research jobs, as well as the effect of relaxation methods in relieving fatigue.
Keywords: epidermal electronics; machine learning; mental fatigue; nonintrusive monitoring; physiological signals.