Human Performance Assessment: Evaluation and Experimental Use of Wearable Sensors for Brain Activity Measures

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 behavioural measures and subjective metrics have been used to address cognitive factors associated with pilots or operators of safety critical systems. However, the advance in wearable physiology technologies could provide additional performance metrics directly driven from brain based measures, potentially validating subjective assessments and ultimately bringing us closer towards maintaining safe and effective performance. Furthermore, these techniques may also aid the 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 of studies are described whereby 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 operational settings.