Acta Med. 2023, 66: 55-60
Evaluation of Diurnal Changes of Mental Fatigue Using a New Portable Device for Visual Cognitive Evoked Potentials
In the age homogenous group of 13 healthy volunteers, we examined visual evoked potentials (VEP) visually evoked cognitive potentials (event-related potentials – ERP) and choice reaction time (CRT) five times during the day (from 10.00 a.m. up to midnight) to verify whether there are significant changes of the measured parameters of the cortical evoked potentials and CRT which might reflect the level of the mental fatigue. The electrophysiological testing was done with the use of a new portable VEP device named “VEPpeak” enabling to perform the examination outside standard labs in almost any conditions. It was found that the latency of ERP (P300 peak time) and CRT displayed significant prolongation toward midnight while VEP latency and all amplitudes did not change significantly. This pilot study supports our idea that the portable VEP device possibly might be used for the objective examination of mental fatigue that is needed in many situations. This should be confirmed in a larger study also including a comparison with non-electrophysiological fatigue testing.
Keywords
visual evoked potentials (VEP), event related potentials (ERP), P300, mental fatigue, VEPpeak device.
Funding
The authors are grateful for the financial support from the Ministry of Health of the Czech Republic (Grant AZV No. NV18-08-00314) and by the project of Charles University Cooperatio – NEUR.
References
Copyright
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.
