2013 7th International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare and Workshops PVT-Touch: Adapting a Reaction Time Test for Touchscreen Devices

Abstract-The Psychomotor Vigilance Task (PVT) is a vali dated reaction time (RT) test used to assess aspects of sleep loss including alertness and sleepiness. PVT typically requires a phys ical button to assess RT, which minimizes the effect of execution time (the time taken to perform a gesture) on RT. When translat ing this application to mobile devices, a touchscreen version is useful for widespread in situ sleepiness assessments to produce more ecologically valid data. We describe the Android-based implementation of a touchscreen version of PVT, called PVT Touch. In an evaluation (N=20), we compared four different touchscreen input techniques to a physical button: touch down, finger lift,finger tilt, and goal crossing. We found that touch down was comparable to the physical button approach used in tradi tional PVT in execution time and in several measures associated with sleepiness, and was preferred by most participants. We also found that finger lift may be a more precise but less intuitive measure, which may warrant further study. Keywords-reaction time, psychomotor vigilance task, PVT, sleep, health assessment, health, touchscreen, personal informatics. I