“E-tattoo” could follow the mental workload for people in high-level jobs, says the study | Science
Whether it is to make sums or determine what to send your new date, certain tasks produce a crossed front. Now scientists say they have found a device to monitor such an effort: an electronic tattoo, glued to the forehead.
Researchers say that the apparatus could prove to be precious among pilots, health workers and other professions where mental load management is crucial to prevent disasters.
“For this type of high-demand and high speed scenario, we hope to have this real-time mental load decoder which can give people a warning and an alert so that they can adapt to self-adapting, or they can ask AI or a colleague to unload a part of their work,” said Dr Nanshu Lu, an author of the health of health, but also adding the protection, Available may not only help workers avoid their health, but also to protection.
Writing in the newspaper of the newspaperRead and his colleagues describe how the use of questionnaires to investigate the mental workload is problematic, especially because people are poor to objectively judge cognitive efforts and that they are generally carried out after a task.
Meanwhile, existing electroencephalography (EEG) and electrooculography (EOG) (EOG), which can be used to assess the mental workload by measuring brain waves and eye movements respectively, are wired, bulky and subject to erroneous measurements resulting from movements.
On the other hand, the “e-tattoo” is a light and flexible wireless device.
The black and roasted path of the tattoo e is composed of a graphite -based driver material and is attached to the front using a driver's adhesive film.
Four EEG square EEG electrodes, positioned on the forehead, each detect a different region of brain activity – with a reference electrode behind the ear – while the rectangular EOG electrodes, placed vertically and horizontally around the eyes, provide data on eye movements. Each of the extensible electrodes is covered with an additional driver material.
The e-tattoo, which is tailor-made and disposable, is connected to a reusable flexible printed circuit using driver's ribbon, while a light battery can be cut on the device.
After finding that the e-tattoo tattoo worked as well as the traditional EEG and EOG devices to monitor brain waves and eye movements, the team tested technology on six participants.
Each participant has been shown a screen on which 20 letters broke out, one at a time, in various places. The participants were invited to click on a mouse if the letter itself, or its location, corresponded to that shown a given number of letters (N). Each participant has carried out the task several times, the value n varying between 0 and 3 – corresponding to four levels of difficulty.
The team found that, as the task became more difficult, the different types of brain waves detected showed changes in activity that corresponded to greater mental workload.
The team then fed the EEG and EOG data, as well as the “N” numbers, in an automatic learning algorithm. After a period of training, the researchers found that the algorithm was doing better than the chance to predict the mental workload of a participant based solely on their data EEG and EOG.
Lu said the complete device – including the chip and the battery – was to cost less than $ 200 (£ 148). The team now develops the approach so that the signals can be decoded by the device's microprocessor and sent to an application to alert the user if their mental workload is too high.
But the remedy is not necessarily to move to a simple task.
“Previous studies have indicated that optimal mental performance occurs when the request for mental workload is not too weak or too high,” said read. “When it's too low, it's very boring and people will just lose the accent.”
