The performance of professional tasks with a high cognitive, emotional, and even physiological demand, can cause a state of mental fatigue, which implies attentional alterations, greater errors in the tasks performed and a decrease in personal and work productivity caused by a deterioration of the cognitive control processes. The present study presents a mobile phone application named BAlert that allows monitoring and controlling the body's fatigue processes based on the scores obtained in the Stroop effect and the heart rate variability. A pilot study has been carried out with a sample of 63 adults who have used the application a total of 942 times. The results allow us to classify the subjects, by logistic regression analysis, in their fatigue levels in 74% of the occasions. These results highlight the importance of this mobile application to control work fatigue processes in different possible scenarios (military, health, sports, business, etc.).

Addressing fatigue is useful in a variety of scenarios and activities. Fatigue has recently been studied from a psychophysiological standpoint. As a result, the expression and impact of peripheral and central fatigue has been evaluated. Driving is one occupation where tiredness has disastrous consequences. BAlert is a smartphone app that approaches exhaustion with psychophysiological measures. More specifically, it evaluates the level of fatigue via heart rate variability (HRV) data and the cognitive compromise via Stroop effect. The goal of this study is to determine if there are gender differences in fatigue levels among professional drivers using the BAlert app. Statistically significant differences were found in the number of hours awake, in different parameters of HRV (AVNN, PNN50, RMSSD, and SDNN), in the level of stress, as well as in the cognitive response evaluated through the app. The results are discussed and their implications for the management of work fatigue are presented.

El presente artículo corresponde a un archivo originalmente publicado en el Boletín de la Escuela de Medicina, actualmente incluido en el historial de Ars Medica Revista de ciencias médicas. El contenido del presente artículo, no necesariamente representa la actual línea editorial. Para mayor información visitar el siguiente vínculo: