Effect of Indoor Forest Bathing on Reducing Feelings of Fatigue Using Cerebral Activity as an Indicator

Abstract

We created an indoor forest bathing environment in a sunlight-type environmentally controlled chamber and both physiological and psychological measurements were conducted for the evaluation of mental fatigue reduction. At first, a working memory load experiment was performed among 10 participants in a space without plants to identify an indicator correlating with feelings of fatigue, using the cerebral activity of the prefrontal cortex. Then, the indicator was used to evaluate whether a 20-min exposure to an indoor forest bathing environment reduced the level of the feeling of fatigue. The working memory load experiment demonstrated that, when mental fatigue increased, the amount of oxygenated hemoglobin (oxy-Hb) in the right prefrontal cortex and the right-left difference in oxy-Hb (∆RL oxy-Hb) in the prefrontal cortex increased. These were proposed as indicators of mental fatigue. In the indoor forest bathing experiment, staying in an indoor green space showed that the subjective values of feeling of fatigue decreased and ∆RL oxy-Hb decreased. Since these results demonstrated an opposite effect to the increase in ∆RL oxy-Hb related to the feeling of fatigue, it was inferred that the decrease in ∆RL oxy-Hb reflected the fatigue reduction in the indoor forest bathing environment.