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Title: 'E-Tattoo' Could Track Mental Workload For People In High-Stake Jobs,
Study Says

Link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/05/29/2...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Whether it is doing
sums or working out what to text your new date, some tasks produce a furrowed
brow. Now scientists say they have come up with a device to monitor such
effort: an electronic tattoo, stuck to the forehead. The researchers say the
device could prove valuable among pilots, healthcare workers and other
professions where managing mental workload is crucial to preventing
catastrophes. "For this kind of high-demand and high-stake scenario,
eventually we hope to have this real-time mental workload decoder that can
give people some warning and alert so that they can self-adjust, or they can
ask AI or a co-worker to offload some of their work," said Dr Nanshu Lu, an
author of the research from the University of Texas at Austin, adding the
device may not only help workers avoid serious mistakes but also protect
their health. Writing in the journal Device, Lu and colleagues describe how
using questionnaires to investigate mental workload is problematic, not least
as people are poor at objectively judging cognitive effort and they are
usually conducted after a task. Meanwhile, existing electroencephalography
(EEG) and electrooculography (EOG) devices, that can be used to assess mental
workload by measuring brain waves and eye movements respectively, are wired,
bulky and prone to erroneous measurements arising from movements. By
contrast, the "e-tattoo" is a lightweight, flexible, wireless device. The
black, wiggly path of the e-tattoo is composed of a graphite-based conductive
material, and is attached to the forehead using conductive adhesive film.
Four square EEG electrodes, positioned on the forehead, each detect a
different region of brain activity -- with a reference electrode behind the
ear -- while rectangular EOG electrodes, placed vertically and horizontally
around the eyes, provide data about eye movements. Each of the stretchable
electrodes is coated in an additional conductive material. The e-tattoo,
which is bespoke and disposable, is connected to a reusable flexible printed
circuit using conductive tape, while a lightweight battery can be clipped to
the device. The device is expected to cost less than $200 and be accompanied
with an app to alert the user if their mental workload is too high.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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