Psychomotor Vigilance Test - discussion and testing

Trish

Trish

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Bio-signals Collecting System for Fatigue Level Classification, 2023, Younggun Lee et al

Creekside said:
I just tried the PVT ( http://www.sleepdisordersflorida.com/pvt1.html#responseOut ) and got a result of 283 ms, which was rated "excellent". That's despite having written "groggy, sluggish" in my journal this morning. So, based on that I don't think PVT is a good measure of ME's "fatigue-like" symptom.
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I've just tried it. This is what it said:

Test Duration= 120 seconds

Number of false starts= 0

Average response time= 367 msec over 26 attempts.

Your results show that your alertness may be suboptimal. Consider medical evaluation.
 
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Response time av 589. Not surprisingly as PEM today following dentist appointment yesterday and I didn’t go to sleep til 9 am

I got the same message about suboptimal alertness.

eta I will try to remember to give it a go on a non PEM day
 
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Trish said:
I've just tried it. This is what it said:

Test Duration= 120 seconds

Number of false starts= 0

Average response time= 367 msec over 26 attempts.

Your results show that your alertness may be suboptimal. Consider medical evaluation.
Click to expand...
I got the same result as you, except that my response time was slower. Suboptimal.

Edit: it was 437 msec
 
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Interesting. Should we have a poll of PVT results? Maybe one taken during a bad PEM time, and one for non-PEM? Maybe one for morning and evening? My single test didn't convince me of a correlation between my results and my perception of "fatigue", but maybe more data will show that it's useful for more typical PWME.
 
Creekside said:
Interesting. Should we have a poll of PVT results? Maybe one taken during a bad PEM time, and one for non-PEM? Maybe one for morning and evening? My single test didn't convince me of a correlation between my results and my perception of "fatigue", but maybe more data will show that it's useful for more typical PWME.
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I thought about adding a poll, but it's hard to allow on a single list of options for all the possible variations in different factors like time of day, severity level, whether in PEM or not, and scores on the test.
So let's just each do our own record keeping if we're interested, and post here if we want to share our results.
 
Did anyone else find that it took several presses to make the numbers stop, and that pressing the screen was more likely to change the image size?

Average response time= 2601 msec over 14 attempts.

Which I don’t think is a fair reflection of my psychomotor vigilance.
 
Just tried it on my phone:
average 1068 over 23 attempts.
Not only did it not register a few times so I needed to touch the screen again, but it also more or less doubled the time from when I touched to when it registered. You can see it counting off in milliseconds, so it was obvious.
I think the answer is, use a mouse. It registered the time much faster.

So my touchscreen phone more than doubled the times on my laptop with old fashioned wired mouse.
 
There are going to be so many different hardware and connectivity and muscular-skeletal factors impacting on response that it’s probably only useful for tracking individual performance (assuming all those factors remain stable) rather than using it as a benchmark.
 
Agreed. It's probably mainly used in a clinic on the clinic's computer, so they will be able to compare patients as well as track changes in individuals.
I think I'll have a go at tracking mine.
It would still be potentially useful for ME research, I think, including as part of longitudinal studies where patients test regularly at home. But that may mean providing them with reliable equipment to do the test.
 
I reckon it’s only going to be of interest to see if there’s a difference between results when in/ out of PEM for each of us using the same device. Comparing against others probably pointless.
 
I've just been out of the house for new glasses (which is a very brief excursion, once every 2-3 weeks) and was "feeling it" a little bit, sitting quietly back home recovering. I have the fatiguability "lactic acidosis zinginess" to a very mild degree which is fading off — I certainly wouldn't characterise it as even trivial PEM. So let's call it +/- baseline.

I thought I performed relatively poorly (in comparison to what I expected from previously healthy me). And yet I got good results like Creekside —

Test Duration= 122 seconds
Number of false starts= 0
Average response time= 268 msec over 24 attempts.

Your results show that your vigilance and alertness are excellent
Click to expand...

(My hardware was laptop, with index finger triggering a good quality trackpad. I didn't "cheat" with the new glasses.)
 
I tracked this as part of symptom monitoring for about a month, measuring it in the morning, missing some days, maybe 5 years ago.

For example, my best score was 307. On that day, my morning resting heart rate was 65, my morning shock index (0.7), pulse pressure (36) and POTS standing test (19) were all normal. Morning resting BP was 110 over 68;standing BP increased to 120 over 84. I did a grocery shop that day. The next day was an average day.

My worst score was 459. On that day, my morning resting heart rate was 64, my morning shock index was very abnormal - 1.08. Pulse pressure was very abnormal - 23. The POTS standing test was positive for POTS (41). Morning resting BP was lowish (102 over 63) and it got worse upon standing for 10 minutes (97 over 74). I think all those measures add up to the heart and brain not getting enough blood when I was upright. But - I didn't record it as a PEM day. I did a bit of gardening. The next day was a bad PEM day though.

My second worst score was 431. Morning resting heart rate was 63, morning shock index 0.9 (a bit high), pulse pressure normal (32), POTS positive (35). Morning resting BP was lowish 104/63; standing BP was 106/74. It wasn't a bad day. The next day was an average day.

Looking at the data, I think the reaction speed score correlated loosely with the cardiovascular measures - a slow speed was more likely to go with a positive morning POTS test. PEM and fatigue bad enough to need to be in bed seemed to follow bad cardiovascular and reaction time scores - delayed by a day. But there aren't perfect relationships.

It would be great to have a whole lot of people doing detailed monitoring including the reaction speed test.
 
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