In occupational safety and health (OSH) research, the study of physical agents, like noise, depends on the realistic representation of workplace conditions. Both, the investigation of soundscapes in the real world and the laboratory, have each specific advantages and disadvantages. Virtual reality (VR) simulations of workplaces, including realistic soundscapes, might offer the required flexibility to probe stress-related issues imposed by noise in a rapidly changing work environment (e.g., home-based or mobile work). Like observations at the workplace, VR allows the study of a spectrum of occupational settings but under controlled conditions. In our study, we aim to measure the mental workload arising from work-related soundscapes during cognitive tasks. Eventually, we will compare neuronal activity in the real-world (i.e., living lab representation) and a VR setting.
Here, we present the planned experimental setting, the physical design of the living lab, and the implemented properties of its digital twin in VR. We introduce the electroencephalogram (EEG) as a neuro-physiological measurement for assessing the mental state, performance measurements from the cognitive tasks, and the subjective questionnaires used.
An open research question is how the specific neuronal signatures signaling mental workload in the EEG differ between living lab and VR settings. Thus, we primarily address the issue of whether the brain state differs fundamentally between the living lab and VR when observing the mental workload of a cognitive task under noise. As a second research question, we study how irrelevant sound sources increase or decrease the mental workload and identify suitable EEG markers from the time and frequency domain. The main implication of our work is to demonstrate the potential of VR for OSH research using digital twins of real-world occupational settings when considering the acoustic environment.
