Baertsch Tanja, Huang Ying-Yin, Menozzi Marino
Department of Health Sciences and Technology, ETH Zürich, Zurich, 8092, Switzerland.
Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, National Taipei University of Technology (Taipei Tech), Taipei, Taiwan.
Heliyon. 2023 Jun 1;9(6):e16610. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e16610. eCollection 2023 Jun.
Visual attention is crucial to many tasks during working. When it is impaired, the risk of occupational accidents is increased. A potential accident prevention would be the tracking of employees' attentional states to construct break regimes. There is a promising visual attention test administered on a computer monitor (CM) that has several advantages over widely used continuous performance tests in detecting inattentiveness in occupational environments. However, as the setup with a CM is impractical for the use in particular working environments (e.g., lack of space or disturbing exposure to light), the test was implemented into a head-mounted display (HMD). This study aimed to investigate whether the HMD version of the test is a suitable alternative to the CM version. For this purpose, participants (N = 30; 20-29 y) performed both tests. The performance on the HMD was significantly lower than on the CM. Moreover, the performances were compared with normative data recorded with a CM in a previous study. These data significantly differ from the data recorded with the CM in the present study. This emphasizes the importance of a standardized test environment, which could be provided by an HMD. Conclusively, this study revealed that the new VR tool, based on a previous test designed to assess visual skills in a complex visual environment, exhibited good psychometric property regarding the reliability. In additional, no problems were revealed regarding the functionality and usability of the HMD.
视觉注意力在工作中的许多任务中都至关重要。当它受损时，职业事故的风险就会增加。一种潜在的事故预防措施是跟踪员工的注意力状态以制定休息制度。有一种在电脑显示器（CM）上进行的很有前景的视觉注意力测试，在检测职业环境中的注意力不集中方面，它比广泛使用的持续性操作测试有几个优势。然而，由于使用CM的设置在特定工作环境中不切实际（例如，空间不足或光线干扰），该测试被应用到了头戴式显示器（HMD）中。本研究旨在调查该测试的HMD版本是否是CM版本的合适替代方案。为此，参与者（N = 30；20 - 29岁）进行了这两种测试。HMD上的表现明显低于CM上的表现。此外，还将这些表现与先前一项研究中用CM记录的标准数据进行了比较。这些数据与本研究中用CM记录的数据有显著差异。这强调了标准化测试环境的重要性，而HMD可以提供这样的环境。总之，本研究表明，基于先前设计用于评估复杂视觉环境中视觉技能的测试的新VR工具，在可靠性方面表现出良好的心理测量特性。此外，未发现HMD在功能和可用性方面存在问题。
