ABSTRACT
Various methods of measuring physiology used in the medical field are increasingly being borrowed for human factors and ergonomics purposes to study operators in workplaces with respect to workload or, more specifically, mental workload. There are many reasons why the measurement of operators’ mental workload earns great interest these days, and will increasingly enjoy this status in the near future. First, the nature of work has largely changed, or at least been extended, from physical (e.g., measured by muscle force exertion, addressed in this section) to cognitive (e.g., measured in brain activity, also covered in this section), a trend that has not reached ceiling yet. Second, accidents in workplaces of all sorts are numerous and costly, and they are seemingly ineradicably and in fact largely attributable to the victims themselves, human beings. Third, human errors related to mental workload, in the sense of inadequate information processing, are the major causes of the majority of accidents (Smiley and Brookhuis, 1987).
