Mental fatigue prediction during eye-typing

PLoS One. 2021 Feb 22;16(2):e0246739. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0246739. eCollection 2021.

Abstract

Mental fatigue is a common problem associated with neurological disorders. Until now, there has not been a method to assess mental fatigue on a continuous scale. Camera-based eye-typing is commonly used for communication by people with severe neurological disorders. We designed a working memory-based eye-typing experiment with 18 healthy participants, and obtained eye-tracking and typing performance data in addition to their subjective scores on perceived effort for every sentence typed and mental fatigue, to create a model of mental fatigue for eye-typing. The features of the model were the eye-based blink frequency, eye height and baseline-related pupil diameter. We predicted subjective ratings of mental fatigue on a six-point Likert scale, using random forest regression, with 22% lower mean absolute error than using simulations. When additionally including task difficulty (i.e. the difficulty of the sentences typed) as a feature, the variance explained by the model increased by 9%. This indicates that task difficulty plays an important role in modelling mental fatigue. The results demonstrate the feasibility of objective and non-intrusive measurement of fatigue on a continuous scale.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Adult
  • Blinking
  • Computer Simulation
  • Eye-Tracking Technology*
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Machine Learning
  • Male
  • Memory, Short-Term
  • Mental Fatigue / etiology*
  • Models, Statistical
  • Pupil
  • Task Performance and Analysis*

Grants and funding

The author(s) received funding for this work from Bevica Fonden and Horizon 2020 EU project ReHyb (ID No 871767).