Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2017

City

Dayton

Abstract

The emerging wearable human performance monitoring technologies can help evaluate the cognitive status and capacities of the crew in the cockpit as well as those operating ground control stations. Traditionally the use of behavioral measures and subjective metrics has been used to address cognitive factors associated with pilots or operators of safety critical systems. However, the advance in wearable physiologytechnologies could provide additional performance metrics directly driven from brain based measures, potentially validating subjective assessments and ultimately bringing us closer towardsmaintaining safe and effective performance. Furthermore, these techniques may also aidthe design and evaluation of new technologies that are being presented as increasing operational capacity, efficiency and safety across the aerospace domain. The measurement of real time brain activity from the operator can help evaluate decision making, and reliably compare workload burden of next generation system versus legacy systems in the air transportation domain. This paper outlines key cognitive areas of interest when attempting to explore the correlation between physiological state changes and psychological constructs. A number ofstudies are describedwhereby wearable systems, namely electroencephalography (EEG), and functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), are used to evaluate human performance.The potential advantages and challenges are discussed in relation to implementing these sensors in real operationalsettings.


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