Neurophysiological Assessment of An Innovative Maritime Safety System in Terms of Ship Operators' Mental Workload, Stress, and Attention in the Full Mission Bridge Simulator.

The current industrial environment relies heavily on maritime transportation. Despite the continuous technological advances for the development of innovative safety software and hardware systems, there is a consistent gap in the scientific literature regarding the objective evaluation of the performance of maritime operators. The human factor is profoundly affected by changes in human performance or psychological state. The difficulty lies in the fact that the technology, tools, and protocols for investigating human performance are not fully mature or suitable for experimental investigation. The present research aims to integrate these two concepts by (i) objectively characterizing the psychological state of mariners, i.e., mental workload, stress, and attention, through their electroencephalographic (EEG) signal analysis, and (ii) validating an innovative safety framework countermeasure, defined as Human Risk-Informed Design (HURID), through the aforementioned neurophysiological approach. The proposed study involved 26 mariners within a high-fidelity bridge simulator while encountering collision risk in congested waters with and without the HURID. Subjective, behavioral, and neurophysiological data, i.e., EEG, were collected throughout the experimental activities. The results showed that the participants experienced a statistically significant higher mental workload and stress while performing the maritime activities without the HURID, while their attention level was statistically lower compared to the condition in which they performed the experiments with the HURID (all p < 0.05). Therefore, the presented study confirmed the effectiveness of the HURID during maritime operations in critical scenarios and led the way to extend the neurophysiological evaluation of the HFs of maritime operators during the performance of critical and/or standard shipboard tasks.

Human-Machine Interaction Assessment by Neurophysiological Measures: A Study on Professional Air Traffic Controllers.

This study aims at investigating the possibility to employ neurophysiological measures to assess the humanmachine interaction effectiveness. Such a measure can be used to compare new technologies or solutions, with the final purpose to enhance operator's experience and increase safety. In the present work, two different interaction modalities (Normal and Augmented) related to Air Traffic Management field have been compared, by involving 10 professional air traffic controllers in a control tower simulated environment. Experimental task consisted in locating aircrafts in different airspace positions by using the sense of hearing. In one modality (i.e. "Normal"), all the sound sources (aircrafts) had the same amplification factor. In the "Augmented" modality, the amplification factor of the sound sources located along the participant head sagittal axis was increased, while the intensity of sound sources located outside this axis decreased. In other words, when the user oriented his head toward the aircraft position, the related sound was amplified. Performance data, subjective questionnaires (i.e. NASA-TLX) and neurophysiological measures (i.e. EEG-based) related to the experienced workload have been collected. Results showed higher significant performance achieved by the users during the "Augmented" modality with respect to the "Normal" one, supported by a significant decreasing in experienced workload, evaluated by using EEG-based index. In addition, Performance and EEG-based workload index showed a significant negative correlation. On the contrary, subjective workload analysis did not show any significant trend. This result is a demonstration of the higher effectiveness of neurophysiological measures with respect to subjective ones for Human-Computer Interaction assessment.

EEG-Based Cognitive Control Behaviour Assessment: an Ecological study with Professional Air Traffic Controllers.

Several models defining different types of cognitive human behaviour are available. For this work, we have selected the Skill, Rule and Knowledge (SRK) model proposed by Rasmussen in 1983. This model is currently broadly used in safety critical domains, such as the aviation. Nowadays, there are no tools able to assess at which level of cognitive control the operator is dealing with the considered task, that is if he/she is performing the task as an automated routine (skill level), as procedures-based activity (rule level), or as a problem-solving process (knowledge level). Several studies tried to model the SRK behaviours from a Human Factor perspective. Despite such studies, there are no evidences in which such behaviours have been evaluated from a neurophysiological point of view, for example, by considering brain activity variations across the different SRK levels. Therefore, the proposed study aimed to investigate the use of neurophysiological signals to assess the cognitive control behaviours accordingly to the SRK taxonomy. The results of the study, performed on 37 professional Air Traffic Controllers, demonstrated that specific brain features could characterize and discriminate the different SRK levels, therefore enabling an objective assessment of the degree of cognitive control behaviours in realistic settings.