Assessment of the Psycho-Emotional State Induced by Open-Skill Sport Activity: An Electroencephalography-Based Study

Electroencephalography (EEG) is an effective tool for monitoring the psycho-emotional state induced by open-skill sport activities characterized by dynamic environments and unpredictable situations, offering objective insights into mental engagement. This study aims to characterize the psycho-emotional state induced by table tennis sport activity by exploiting EEG-derived biomarkers. The 'Real World Table Tennis' database was analyzed, which includes EEG signals of 25 subjects acquired before, during and after playing table tennis. After preprocessing, 30-s EEG epochs were recursively extracted every 5 s. For each epoch, EEG rhythms were extracted and combined to obtain 37 engagement indexes, defined as ratios of two or more EEG rhythm powers. Median trends of each index were obtained for five cortical regions, and the Wilcoxon signed-rank test was applied to assess significant temporal changes. Results show that engagement indexes can effectively characterize psycho-emotional dynamics during table tennis, capturing the transition from resting to game phase in all cortical regions and exhibiting an increasing trend when having beta/alpha in their definition, and a decreasing trend when having high-frequency rhythms in the denominator. Our findings demonstrate the feasibility of using engagement indexes to monitor psycho-emotional states induced by open-skill sports and provide a framework for investigating mental engagement over time.