Assessing mental workload with wearable devices - Reliability and applicability of heart rate and motion measurements

Sebastian Mach; Pamela Storozynski; Josephine Halama; Josef F Krems

doi:10.1016/j.apergo.2022.103855

Assessing mental workload with wearable devices - Reliability and applicability of heart rate and motion measurements

Appl Ergon. 2022 Nov:105:103855. doi: 10.1016/j.apergo.2022.103855. Epub 2022 Aug 10.

Authors

Sebastian Mach¹, Pamela Storozynski², Josephine Halama³, Josef F Krems²

Affiliations

¹ Research Group Cognitive and Engineering Psychology, Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany. Electronic address: sebastian.mach@psychologie.tu-chemnitz.de.
² Research Group Cognitive and Engineering Psychology, Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany.
³ Professorship Cognitive Psychology and Human Factors, Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany.

PMID: 35961246
DOI: 10.1016/j.apergo.2022.103855

Abstract

Wearable devices are increasingly used for assessing physiological data. Industry 4.0 aims to achieve the real-time assessment of the workers' condition to adapt processes including the current mental workload. Mental workload can be assessed via physiological data. This paper researches the potential of wearable devices for mental workload assessment by utilizing heart rate and motion data collected with a smartwatch. A laboratory study was conducted with four levels of mental workload, ranging from none to high and during sitting and stepping activities. When sitting, a difference in the heart rate and motion data from the smartwatch was only found between no mental workload and any mental workload task. For the stepping condition, differences were found for the movement data. Based on these results, wearable devices could be useful in the future for detecting whether a mental demanding task is currently performed during low levels of physical activity.

Keywords: Validation; Wearable devices; Workload assessment.