Abstract
Many VDTs are introduced in various modern offices and work centers. With its trend, fatigue by using a VDT is appeared to be a social problem. As measurement methods for fatigue, eye accommodation time, CFF (critical flicker frequency) and subjective ratings for fatigue are frequently used in many researches. However, several aspects of issue were pointed out concerning these methods.
This research focuses on general fatigue, rather than visual fatigue. A measurement method for general fatigue is proposed in visually cognitive works with VDTs. As the psychological background, Channel Capacity Attenuation Model is built. The proposed method is to measure the decrease of channel capacity of central nervous system as based on the model. The method were applied to various tasks and work environments in three experiments. As the results, the method was found to be able to detect the degrees of fatigue among various work environments. Considering these results, it seems to be appropriate as a possible measurement method for general fatigue in actual VDT works.
