Changes in decibel scale wavelength properties of EEG with alertness levels while performing sustained attention tasks

Sridhar P Arjunan; Dinesh K Kumar; Tzyy-Ping Jung

doi:10.1109/IEMBS.2009.5332801

Changes in decibel scale wavelength properties of EEG with alertness levels while performing sustained attention tasks

Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2009:2009:6288-91. doi: 10.1109/IEMBS.2009.5332801.

Authors

Sridhar P Arjunan¹, Dinesh K Kumar, Tzyy-Ping Jung

Affiliation

¹ Biosignal Lab, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, RMIT University, GPO Box 2476V, Melbourne, VIC 3001, Australia. sridhar.arjunan@rmit.edu.au

PMID: 19963917
DOI: 10.1109/IEMBS.2009.5332801

Abstract

Loss of alertness can have dire consequences for people controlling motorized equipment or for people in professions such as defense. Electroencephalogram (EEG) is known to be related to alertness of the person, but due to high level of noise and low signal strength, the use of EEG for such applications has been considered to be unreliable. This study reports the fractal analysis of EEG and identifies the use of maximum fractal length (MFL) as a feature that is inversely correlated with the alertness of the subject. The results show that MFL (of only single channel of EEG) indicates the loss of alertness of the individual with mean (inverse) correlation coefficient = 0.82.

MeSH terms

Adolescent
Adult
Algorithms*
Attention / physiology*
Auditory Perception / physiology
Brain / physiology*
Cognition / physiology*
Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted / methods*
Electroencephalography / methods*
Humans
Task Performance and Analysis*
Young Adult