Simplified subjective workload assessment technique

Although the subjective workload assessment technique (SWAT) has been widel y used, it has two main problems: it is not very sensitive for low mental w orkloads and it requires a time-consumingcard sorting pretask procedure. In this study are presented five variations of SWAT in an effort to overcome the limitations. Four of the variants used the continuous SWAT subscales wh ile one used the discrete SWAT subscale. Fifteen subjects participated in t he experiment. The scales were compared with the original SWAT scale in ter ms of sensitivity and pretask procedure completion time when performing ari thmetic tasks. The results show that all four variants are more sensitive t han the conventional SWAT scale and that the pairwise comparison procedure takes significantly less pretask completion time compared with the original SWAT scale. Thus, the conventional pretask procedure can be replaced by a simple unweighted averaging to yield a scale of high sensitivity.