Accurate reaction times on smartphones: the challenges of developing a mobile psychomotor vigilance task
Arthurs, MelORCID: 0000-0002-2642-4704, Dominguez Veiga, José JuanORCID: 0000-0002-6634-9606 and Ward, Tomás E.ORCID: 0000-0002-6173-6607
(2021)
Accurate reaction times on smartphones: the challenges of developing a mobile psychomotor vigilance task.
In: ISWC '21: 2021 International Symposium on Wearable Computers, 21-26 Sept 2021, Online (USA).
ISBN 978-1-4503-8462-9
The mobile psychomotor vigilance task (PVT) has been found to be a valid predictor of cognitive fatigue. However, absolute reaction time (RT) recorded by mobile PVT is inaccurate. This is concerning as participant RTs are used in the analysis of PVT results. This paper aims to characterise this problem and assess the margin of error across common iOS software frameworks. A novel Arduino test instrument was developed to simulate a user’s reaction, providing a ground truth for the RT. We found in our experiments that there is between a 29.57% and 48.58% increase over the ground truth RT in the iOS implementations tested. These are significant overestimations that will affect the validity of the outcome metrics for any mobile PVT study participants.
Metadata
Item Type:
Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Event Type:
Conference
Refereed:
Yes
Additional Information:
As part of UbiComp '21: The 2021 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing