npj Digital Medicine (Mar 2021)

Digital biomarker of mental fatigue

  • Vincent Wen-Sheng Tseng,
  • Nachiappan Valliappan,
  • Venky Ramachandran,
  • Tanzeem Choudhury,
  • Vidhya Navalpakkam

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41746-021-00415-6
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 4, no. 1
pp. 1 – 5

Abstract

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Abstract Mental fatigue is an important aspect of alertness and wellbeing. Existing fatigue tests are subjective and/or time-consuming. Here, we show that smartphone-based gaze is significantly impaired with mental fatigue, and tracks the onset and progression of fatigue. A simple model predicts mental fatigue reliably using just a few minutes of gaze data. These results suggest that smartphone-based gaze could provide a scalable, digital biomarker of mental fatigue.