Investigating the effect of wearing masks on office work in indoor environments during a pandemic using physiological sensing
Introduction
Due to the spread of the new coronavirus (COVID-19), people's lives have been affected in different ways. Indoor environments are particularly important to slow the spread of the virus, resulting in additional requirements of maintaining good indoor air quality [[1], [2], [3]] and wearing face coverings in common places like office environments and public gatherings [4,5]. For example, as recommended by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), people should wear masks in public events, gatherings, or anywhere with other people, as masks can provide a barrier to respiratory droplets and thus prevent the spreading of COVID-19 [6]. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) recommends employees wear cloth face covering at work to reduce the spread of the virus and thereby the risk of disease transmission [7]. Similarly, the World Health Organization (WHO) also considers wearing masks as a key measure to suppressing transmission of the pandemic and saving lives [8].
To overcome the economic recession during the pandemic period [9], people's working styles have become more and more flexible. For example, employees can choose to work from home and only return to the office seldomly [10]. Nevertheless, not every home has a suitable workplace [9] and home office work requires more online effort and greater concentration during communication, thereby generating visual, auditory, and mental overload [11]. Moreover, it is unavoidable for some employees to go back to the office from time to time to perform professional tasks [12,13]. Therefore, it is crucial to understand the potential effect of wearing a mask on people's productivity and wellness while they are performing work in office-type settings.
Although the efficacy of face masks in preventing the spread of the respiratory virus is confirmed by previous research [14], it may also cause some adverse effects on people [15]. For example, wearing an efficacious mask will affect the respiration cycles, and lead to increased expired air retained within the breath zone [16]. The concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the breath zone will rise significantly after wearing a face mask. This may cause an increase in physiological stress due to the low level of oxygen [17]. In addition, previous studies have shown that wearing a mask for a long time may influence people's health and comfort due to the poor ventilation underneath the mask [15,17,18]. Despite some general effects of wearing masks have been studied, there is a lack of systematic investigation to understand the effect of wearing masks on the performance and mental health of individuals who work in office-like indoor environments (the setting, social features, and physical conditions in which people could perform office work [19]). This raises an important question: since wearing masks may adversely impact the breath zone air condition in different aspects, how will it affect the physiological responses (e.g., work engagement, mental workload, and skin conductance level) and task performance of people while they are performing office work?
To answer this question, an experiment is needed. Based on the literature, specific types of physiological data are correlated with human psychological states. For example, the brain signal is correlated with psychological stress [20], and galvanic skin response (GSR) is proven as a good indicator of detecting emotions [21]. Therefore, instead of collecting data in subjective approaches such as questionnaires, the experiment is designed based on physiological sensing. The experiments are conducted in a controlled lab environment, and computer-based cognitive tasks are designed for the subjects to simulate typical office tasks. Meanwhile, the subjects' physiological responses and performance are recorded. Based on previous research, work engagement (“a positive, fulfilling, work-related state characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption [22]”) and mental workload (“the ‘costs’ a human operator incurs as tasks are performed [23]”) can directly affect the productivity of the employee [[24], [25], [26], [27]]. In addition, skin conductance level (SCL) and heart rate (HR) are found relevant to the general changes in autonomic arousal [[28], [29], [30]]. Therefore, these physiological indicators are measured under the scenarios with and without masks. Based on the guideline of CDC and OSHA, the two most common types of masks used during the pandemic, cloth and surgical masks [6,7] are used in the experiments. The collected experimental data is further analyzed and compared to provide insights into the effect of wearing masks on the subjects. The objectives of this study can thus be summarized as: (1) to investigate the effect of wearing different mask types on work engagement; (2) to understand the effect of wearing different mask types on the mental workload; (3) to investigate the effect of wearing different mask types on other important physiological responses (i.e., SCL and HR); and (4) to compare the task performance of the subjects before and after wearing a mask.
This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews the related work. Detailed methodology is described in Section 3, which includes two major parts: (1) experimental design, and (2) data collection and process. Section 4 shows the experimental results and analysis, and Section 5 provides a discussion of the results and limitations, followed by conclusions in Section 6.
Section snippets
Related works
This section provides three main literature review categories to support the motivation and methodology of this study. First, existing literature on the effect of wearing masks on people's life and wellness are reviewed. The research gaps in previous studies are identified based on this literature review. Second, the utilization of physiological data to evaluate people’s states is reviewed to support the usage of biosensors in the experiment. Third, to support the design of the cognitive tasks,
Research methodology
In this study, a comprehensive framework was developed to investigate the effect of wearing masks on work engagement, mental workload, SCL, HR, and task performance, as shown in Fig. 1. To simulate daily office work, subjects were asked to perform three cognitive tasks including number addition, visual search, and digit recall. Three sections of experiments were conducted: (1) the subject performed cognitive tasks without any mask (baseline); (2) the subject wore a surgical mask to perform
Comparing the effect of wearing a mask on work engagement (FAI)
Fig. 7 shows the average work engagement represented by the FAI for different subjects (subjects 1 to 9 are females and subjects 10 to 20 are males) while they were performing the cognitive tasks. Based on the data points from the 8-s time windows, a p-value of 0.05 was used in this study to determine if there were significant differences between any two pairs of the results. As a result, significant differences were found in most cases while the results varied across individuals. However, the
Discussion
In general, there were nonnegligible effects of wearing a mask on work engagement and HR when each individual was considered in isolation. However, the effects varied a lot across individuals, and no one-size-fits-all pattern was found to conclude the effects. The personalized pattern of the effects indicated that people might have different feelings regarding wearing a mask during the pandemic. For example, some might feel safer with a mask and then be more engaged in the tasks, while others
Conclusions
This paper investigates the effect of wearing a mask on physiological responses and the performance of individuals who work in office-like indoor environments. The work engagement, mental workload, SCL, HR, and task performance are measured and collected. Based on the results from brain waves and SCL (considered as an indicator of the mental workload), although the results vary across different individuals, wearing a mask can in general lower the mental workload of the subjects while they are
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Min Deng: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Visualization, Validation, Software, Methodology, Investigation, Funding acquisition, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. Xi Wang: Writing – review & editing, Methodology, Data curation, Conceptualization. Carol C. Menassa: Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Software, Resources, Project administration, Methodology, Conceptualization.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to acknowledge the financial support for this research received from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) CBET 1804321. Any opinions and findings in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the NSF.
References (106)
- et al.
Continuous monitoring of indoor environmental quality using an Arduino-based data acquisition system
J. Build. Eng.
(2018) Świercz, Improvement of indoor air quality by way of using decentralised ventilation
J. Build. Eng.
(2020)- et al.
From BIM to digital twins: a systematic review of the evolution of intelligent building representations in the AEC-FM industry
J. Inf. Technol. Construct.
(2021) - et al.
Influence of social media platforms on public health protection against the COVID-19 pandemic via the mediating effects of public health awareness and behavioral changes: integrated model
J. Med. Internet Res.
(2020) - et al.
The differential impact of COVID‐19 on the work conditions of women and men academics during the lockdown
Gend. Work. Organ.
(2021) The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Occupational safety and health administration
World Health Organization
- et al.
The impact of pandemic COVID-19 in workplace
Eur. J. Bus. Manag.
(2020) - et al.
Flexible employment relationships and careers in times of the COVID-19 pandemic
J. Vocat. Behav.
(2020)
Vocal self-perception of home office workers during the COVID-19 pandemic
J. Voice
Air disinfection procedures in the dental office during the COVID-19 pandemic
Med. Pr.
COVID-19 case and contact investigation in an office workspace
Mil. Med.
Efficacy of face mask in preventing respiratory virus transmission: a systematic review and meta-analysis
Trav. Med. Infect. Dis.
Effects of wearing masks on human health and comfort during the COVID-19 pandemic
IOP Conf. Ser. Earth Environ. Sci.
Effect of wearing a face mask on fMRI BOLD contrast
Neuroimage
A study on the effect of wearing masks on stress response
Memory
Effects of wearing N95 and surgical facemasks on heart rate, thermal stress and subjective sensations
Int. Arch. Occup. Environ. Health
Queuing for Beginners: the Story of Daily Life from Breakfast to Bedtime, Profile Books
Individual alpha frequency (IAF) based quantitative EEG correlates of psychological stress
Indian J. Physiol. Pharmacol.
Combined analysis of GSR and EEG signals for emotion recognition
The measurement of engagement and burnout: a two sample confirmatory factor Analytic approach
J. Happiness Stud.
Physiological metrics of mental workload: A review of recent progress
Multiple-task performance
Investigating the effect of indoor thermal environment on occupants' mental workload and task performance using electroencephalogram
Build. Environ.
Determinants of employee engagement and their impact on employee performance
Int. J. Prod. Perform. Manag.
Impact of employee engagement on employee performance–Case of manufacturing sectors
Int. J. Manag. Res. Bus. Strat.
Improving employee productivity through work engagement: evidence from higher education sector
Manag. Sci. Lett.
Warmer environments increase implicit mental workload even if learning efficiency is enhanced
Front. Psychol.
A guide for analysing electrodermal activity (EDA) & skin conductance responses (SCRs) for psychological experiments (revised version 2.0)
Electrodermal Activity
Wearing face masks strongly confuses counterparts in reading emotions
Front. Psychol
Effect of wearing face masks on the carbon dioxide concentration in the breathing zone
Aerosol Air Qual. Res.
Standard 55-2017
Effect of Wearing Protective Mask During Exposure to EMF on Body Temperature and Heart Rate
Effect of temperature on attention ability based on electroencephalogram measurements
Build. Environ.
Open-plan offices: task performance and mental workload
J. Environ. Psychol.
Measuring mental workload during the performance of advanced laparoscopic tasks
Surg. Endosc.
Effect of long-term indoor thermal history on human physiological and psychological responses: a pilot study in university dormitory buildings
Build. Environ.
Measurement and prediction of work engagement under different indoor lighting conditions using physiological sensing
Build. Environ.
Digital ID framework for human-centric monitoring and control of smart buildings
Build. Simulat.
Neurobehavioral approach for evaluation of office workers' productivity: the effects of room temperature
Build. Environ.
Evaluation of cognitive performance in the heat by functional brain imaging and psychometric testing
Comp. Biochem. Physiol. Mol. Integr. Physiol.
Remote performance measurement (RPM)–A new, internet-based method for the measurement of occupant performance in office buildings
Use of neurobehavioral tests to evaluate the effects of indoor environment quality on productivity
Build. Environ.
Workplace productivity and individual thermal satisfaction
Build. Environ.
Neural basis for brain responses to TV commercials: a high-resolution EEG study
IEEE Trans. Neural Syst. Rehabil. Eng.
Associations of cognitive function scores with carbon dioxide, ventilation, and volatile organic compound exposures in office workers: a controlled exposure study of green and conventional office environments
Environ. Health Perspect.
People trust black COVID-19 masks more than others. But why?
6.15 lighting
A novel convection and radiation combined terminal device: its impact on occupant thermal comfort and cognitive performance in winter indoor environments
Energy Build.
Cited by (6)
A mathematical model for accurately predicting face mask wearer's inhalation exposure to self-exhaled and external pollutants
2024, Separation and Purification TechnologyAn analysis of physiological responses as indicators of driver takeover readiness in conditionally automated driving
2024, Accident Analysis and PreventionThermal responses of face-masked pedestrians during summer: An outdoor investigation under tree-shaded areas
2023, Building and Environment