Mental Workload in Medicine: Foundations, Applications, Open Problems, Challenges and Future Perspectives

Abstract

Abstract-Mental workload is a design concept borrowed from Ergonomics with a significant adoption in the aviation and automobile industries. Nowadays, the consideration of this construct is also taking place in many modern clinical working environments for designing interacting and complex systems that impose ever greater cognitive demand on operators and less physical load. Measuring mental workload is essential for improving the interaction human-system, enhancing performance, reducing the operator's error and increasing safety. However, defining, measuring, assessing mental workload and understanding how this impinges on performance are still open problems. This secondary research is firstly aimed at introducing the construct of mental workload, its foundations, measurements techniques as well as applications in medicine.It then discusses open problems for applied research and eventually, it concludes with a list of challenges for scholars and practitioners. The goal is to provide the reader with a picture of the state of the science of mental workload in medicine and clinical domains with an eye towards future research.

On the Reliability, Validity and Sensitivity of Three Mental Workload Assessment Techniques for the Evaluation of Instructional Designs: A Case Study in a Third-level Course

“…Although it has been studied for the last four decades, no clear definition of MWL has emerged that has a general validity and that is universally accepted (Cain, 2007;Longo, 2016;Rizzo et al, 2016). The main reason for assessing MWL is to measure the mental cost of performing a certain task with the goal of predicting operator and system performance (Cain, 2007).…”

Subjective Usability, Mental Workload Assessments and Their Impact on Objective Human Performance

“…Human Mental Workload (MWL) is an important design concept and it is fundamental for exploring the interaction of people with technological devices [29,31,32]. It has a long history in Psychology with applications in Ergonomics, especially in the transportation industry [14,20].…”

Mental Workload in the Explanation of Automation Effects on ATC Performance

“…A complex and dynamic environment is one in which a person has to find a solution by performing a series of operations that can be characterised as follows: the number of elements relevant to the solution process is large and these are highly interconnected; the system changes dynamically over time; part of the structure and dynamics of the system are opaque (not transparent) for the operator; and the objectives can be multiple and sometimes conflicting [2][3][4]. Complexity is one of the most important causes of mental workload in many areas of human performance [5][6][7][8][9][10].…”