Micro-refresh to Restore Intellectual Concentration Decline during Office
Work: An Attempt at Quantitative Effect Evaluation
Authors: Kitayama Kakeru , Dianita Orchida , Ueda Kimi , Ishii Hirotake , Shimoda Hiroshi , Obayashi Fumiaki 
Published: February 2023

There have been many studies on improving intellectual concentration.
Concentration on intellectual work tends to decrease over time, and this
needs to be prevented to improve intellectual concentration. In conventional
office work, for example, a 10-minute break was taken every hour, but in
this case, concentration drops by the next break. Therefore, there is a
possibility of suppressing the decline in intellectual concentration by
interspersing short breaks of a few seconds to a few tens of seconds in a
shorter cycle than this. In this study, we named this break "micro-refresh"
and aimed to show its effect on improving intellectual concentration by
experiments, and then to study the environmental control method to present
it appropriately in the actual working environment. The "micro-refresh" in
this study differs from the conventional "microbreak" in that it effectively
encourages office workers to refresh themselves in a short period of time.
In other words, this research aims to actively encourage office workers to
refresh themselves through some kind of action, such as controlling the
indoor environment.Therefore, as a basis for this study, it was firstly
confirmed that the effect of micro-refresh can be measured quantitatively.
Short breaks of a few seconds to tens of seconds were forcibly given to the
office workers during the cognitive task, and the difference in intellectual
concentration was confirmed using objective indicators. In addition, the
difference in subjective perception of fatigue and workload was also
confirmed by several questionnaires.In this experiment, a comparison problem
developed by Ueda et al1). was used as a cognitive task. As a simulated
micro-refresh, a system, in which the screen changes to gray when an
arbitrary time elapses and the answer to the problem being solved at that
time is completed, was implemented. The interval between the screen changing
was set to 7 minutes and 30 seconds, and the time until the changed screen
returned to normal was set to 20 seconds. Participants performed a 25-minute
cognitive task with and without the simulated micro-refresh. Their
intellectual concentration was measured as an index, “CTR (Concentration
Time Ratio)”, which expresses concentration time ratio among total working
time and was calculated from response time data of the cognitive task. In
addition, this experiment measured participants’ fatigue and workload
through several questionnaires; (1) Progress questionnaire asking about
subjective level of concentration and fatigue (2) NASA-TLX asking about
workload (3) Subjective symptom screening capturing changes in fatigue
status over time.At this point, the experiment is not yet completed, but it
will be completed by the time the full paper is submitted. From the data
obtained, it will be shown that the response time data, CTR, and
participants’ fatigue and workload are able to be measured and it will be
discussed that whether simulated micro-break prevent CTR from decreasing or
reduce participants’ fatigue and workload.1) Kimi Ueda, Hiroshi Shimoda,
Hirotake Ishii, Fumiaki Obayashi, Kazuhiro Taniguchi: Development of a New
Cognitive Task to Measure Intellectual Concentration Affected by Room
Environment, The Fifth International Conference on Human-Environment System,
2016.