The Effect of Demanding Mental Tasks on Electrodermal Activity and Heart Rate During Physical Activity: A Pilot Study

Abstract

This paper presents the development of a virtual rehabilitation game and mental load with different difficulty blocks. The game was controlled with body tracking and physiological signals - electrocardiography and electrodermal activity - were recorded throughout the session. Several parameters - heart rate (HR), heart rate variability (HRV), skin conductance level (SCL), skin conductance response (SCR), energy expenditure . . . - were extracted from these signals to check mental load influence on them. Mental load was found to affect the variation in kinetic power and instantaneous heart rate; a Support Vector Machine with linear kernel was trained with these two variables and an 82.3% accuracy rate was obtained. Furthermore, the mental load was reflected in the number of errors made by the volunteers, in the selection time and in the number of rounds in the game.