# Toward Wearable MagnetoCardioGraphy (MCG) for Cognitive Workload Monitoring: Advancements in Sensor and Study Design

## TL;DR

This paper presents improvements to a wearable MCG sensor for reliably measuring cognitive workload by analyzing heart rate variability, independent of physical activity.

## Contribution

The study introduces hardware and software enhancements to improve MCG signal quality and validates its ability to detect cognitive workload changes without physical activity interference.

## Key findings

- MCG R-peaks were successfully retrieved throughout all recordings.
- High vs. low cognitive workload was reliably differentiated using mHRV.
- An increase in cognitive workload was confirmed to decrease mHRV with statistical significance.

## Abstract

Despite cognitive workload (CW) being a critical metric in several applications, no technology exists to seamlessly and reliably quantify CW. Previously, we demonstrated the feasibility of a wearable MagnetoCardioGraphy (MCG) sensor to classify high vs. low CW based on MCG-derived heart rate variability (mHRV). However, our sensor was unable to address certain critical operational requirements, resulting in noisy signals, often to the point of being unusable. In addition, test conditions for the participants were not decoupled from motion (i.e., physical activity (PA)), raising questions as to whether the noted changes in mHRV were attributed to CW, PA, or both. This study reports software and hardware advancements to optimize the MCG data quality, and investigates whether changes in CW (in the absence of PA) can be reliably detected. Performance is validated for healthy adults (n = 10) performing three types of CW tasks (one for low CW and two for high CW to eliminate the memory effect). Results demonstrate the ability to retrieve MCG R-peaks throughout the recordings, as well as the ability to differentiate high vs. low CW in all cases, confirming that CW does modulate the mHRV. A paired Bonferroni t-test with significance α=0.01 confirms the hypothesis that an increase in CW decreases mHRV. Our findings lay the groundwork toward a seamless, practical, and low-cost sensor for monitoring CW.