Heart Rate Variability and Asymmetry for Mental Workload Assessment During Physical Activity

Abstract

Mental workload assessment is crucial in many real life applications which require constant attention and where onset of mental fatigue and drowsiness may cause safety hazards. Mental workload studies have assumed individuals are not ambulant, thus bypassing the issue of movement-related ECG artefacts and changing heart beat dynamics due to physical activity. In this work, we take the first steps towards overcoming this limitation and present results of an experiment simultaneously eliciting increasing mental workload states at varying physical activity levels.The potential of the different HRV and HR Asymmetry features to discriminate between low and high mental workload under different activity levels is reported.