Sustainable Employability of the Ageing Worker

One of the cognitive problems that (older) employees experience is mental fatigue. Previous research shows that, after or during a period of mental workload, problems related to cognitive control arise. To prevent these problems, we aim to find objective methods that can detect mental fatigue at an early stage. Two groups of twenty-four participants, ranging in age from 18 to 30 years and 50 to 70 years, performed a set of two computer tasks for 120 minutes. During the experiment task performance, different behavioral (i.e. sitting behavior and keyboard- and mouse use) and physiological parameters (i.e. brain, muscle and heart activity) were recorded. Results show that performance declines with time-on-task; people make more mistakes, detect fewer of these mistakes and need more time to respond. These effects are stronger in younger adults than in older adults. Further research should point out whether the used methods can detect mental fatigue in real-life