Visual fatigue occurrence time when using hand-held intelligent devices

Abstract

Because the mobile phone becomes cheaper and cheaper, the Smartphone will be popular in our life in recent years. Smartphone display technologies have two types, including TFT-LCD (thin film transistor-liquid crystal display) and AMOLED (active matrix organic light-emitting diode). Little studies investigated time to visual fatigue for watching these two display types. Therefore, this study expects to find time to fatigue while using these two display types in order to prevent users from accumulative visual fatigue after prolonged viewing the small size screens. This study recruited 19 young volunteers, 10 males and 9 females, for the experiment. TFT-LCD and AOMLED of display panels were used for test. Another independent variable was the visual stimulation scenarios, including static and dynamic stimulation scenarios. The static stimulation scenario was to read a novel about swordsman on a mobile phone screen. The dynamic stimulation scenario was to play “Jewel Block” on a mobile phone. Objective eyestrain occurrence time and the subjective maximum time to fatigue were measured here for prolonged viewing the mobile phone screen. The results indicated that the time to fatigue from TFT-LCD was significantly longer than that of AMOLED. Dynamic stimulation scenario caused significantly longer time to fatigue than static one. The findings of this study are very useful to develop an ambient intelligent system being able to monitor the time spent for watching from the screen and to intelligently remind the user to take a break at the right time.