A composite measure for the evaluation of mental workload

Abstract

Physiological measures have found reliable sensitivity to the variation of mental efforts to tasks of different difficulty levels. The sensitivity needs to be enhanced for further application. This paper proposed a composite measure consisting of three physiological measures, facial skin temperature, eye blinks and pupil dilation. The facial skin temperature will be measured by an infrared camera. One dimensional iris image will be used for the measurement of eye activities. All measurement will be done in real-time and unobtrusively, A preliminary experiment will be conducted for each measure to demonstrate their sensitivity. The combination then will be accomplished by factor analysis and regression analysis. Last, the analysis will focus on the improvement in sensitivity from the combination of individual measures. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.