Wearable Technologies for Mental Workload, Stress, and Emotional State Assessment during Working-Like Tasks: A Comparison with Laboratory Technologies.

Andrea Giorgi,Pietro Aricò,Nicolina Sciaraffa,Ilaria Simonetti,Gianluca Borghini,Gianluca Di Flumeri,Alessia Vozzi,Luca Tamborra,Vincenzo Ronca,Antonello Di Florio,Dario Rossi

doi:10.3390/s21072332

Abstract

The capability of monitoring user’s performance represents a crucial aspect to improve safety and efficiency of several human-related activities. Human errors are indeed among the major causes of work-related accidents. Assessing human factors (HFs) could prevent these accidents through specific neurophysiological signals’ evaluation but laboratory sensors require highly-specialized operators and imply a certain grade of invasiveness which could negatively interfere with the worker’s activity. On the contrary, consumer wearables are characterized by their ease of use and their comfortability, other than being cheaper compared to laboratory technologies. Therefore, wearable sensors could represent an ideal substitute for laboratory technologies for a real-time assessment of human performances in ecological settings. The present study aimed at assessing the reliability and capability of consumer wearable devices (i.e., Empatica E4 and Muse 2) in discriminating specific mental states compared to laboratory equipment. The electrooculographic (EOG), electrodermal activity (EDA) and photoplethysmographic (PPG) signals were acquired from a group of 17 volunteers who took part to the experimental protocol in which different working scenarios were simulated to induce different levels of mental workload, stress, and emotional state. The results demonstrated that the parameters computed by the consumer wearable and laboratory sensors were positively and significantly correlated and exhibited the same evidences in terms of mental states discrimination.

Highlights

The three parameters involved in the Inverse Efficiency Score (IES) computation were analyzed to determine the one was most affecting the decreasing performance while executing the task
The statistical analysis revealed no significant difference in terms of eye blink rate (EBR)’ between the consumer wearable and laboratory equipment during both N-back task (NB) (p = 0.65) and DG (p = 0.69)
The study demonstrated that signal recorded with consumer wearable and laboratory devices showed a statistically positive correlation and no significant difference (RQ1)

Summary

Introduction

In recent years there was an increasing interest toward wearable monitoring devices to assess physiological and mental activity, both in research and industry [1,2]. These devices are important to the world’s increasingly aging population since this aspect constitutes a relevant risk factor for work-related accidents [3]. Both in research and industry domains the mental states’ monitoring is becoming really important. Starting from few decades ago, there was a shift in the focus from operators’

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