Detecting vigilance in people performing continual monitoring task

Abstract

Vigilance or sustained attention is an extremely important aspect in monotonous and prolonged attention seeking tasks. Recently, Event Related Potentials (ERPs) of Electroencephalograph (EEG) have garnered great attention from the researchers for their application in the task of vigilance assessment. However, till date the studies related to ERPs and their association with vigilance are in their nascent stage, and requires more rigorous research efforts. In this paper, we use P200 and N200 ERPs of EEG for studying vigilance. For this purpose, we perform Mackworth’s clock test experiment with ten volunteers and measure their accuracy. From the measured accuracy and recorded EEG signals, we identify that amplitude of P200 and N200 ERPs is directly correlated with accuracy and thereby to vigilance task. Thus, both P200 and N200 ERPs can be applied to detect vigilance (in real-time) of people involved in continuous monitoring tasks.