DATA SET BERTHON IEEE

Abstract— A mental workload overload is one of the primary sources of human error in industrial tasks such as maintenance. Human errors can compromise not only system safety but also lead to high social and economic costs, reduce equipment productivity, and cause incidents, accidents, and fatalities. To this day, we do not have an adequate assessment of mental workload in maintenance, which would help design maintenance processes more effectively by incorporating this crucial aspect. The objective of this study is to determine the ability of our indicators to measure mental workload during a mechanical task. Thirty-six participants performed a disassembly and assembly task under two different mental workload conditions. Subjective measures (NASA-TLX), performance metrics (number of errors), and cardiovascular data (heart rate, heart rate variability, and breathing rate) were analyzed. We observed a higher number of errors and elevated NASA-TLX scores in the high mental workload condition. Regarding cardiovascular data, interesting trends were observed despite mostly non-significant results. Although this study was conducted under laboratory conditions, it is essential to verify if this method is applicable to maintenance in real-world conditions. This multidimensional method of measuring mental workload is encouraging in its ability to diagnose and understand the cognitive behavior of operators in a laboratory context.Index Terms—Mental workload, Human error, Heart rate variability, NASA-TLX, Maintenance.