Skin Conductance as a Measure of Fatigue in Different Tasks

Abstract

Electrodermal activity ( or galvanic skin response refers to electrical properties of the skin that are controlled by the sympathetic nervous system through sweat glands 1 Although EDA has long been known to be an indicator of stress, arousal, and emotion, few systematic studies of EDA variation across subject, task, and fatigue level have been conducted EDA is generally thought to have two components a background tonic level that may reflect individual characteristics and global subject state and a more rapidly varying phasic level that measures more short term response to environmental factors 2 In order to analyze the relationship between skin conductance and fatigue while performing tasks, we used data from a research study in which participants were asked to perform different tasks on multiple days at different states of fatigue Our results suggest that the phasic signal is highly dependent on participant’s fatigue state and the task being performed