Measurement of pilots’ fatigue, attention and vigilance using EEG, ECG and EYE tracking in the simulated environment

The concept of the Human Performance Envelope (HPE) brought the idea of interdependence between multiple ergonomic factors together with their influence on pilots’ performance. After the analysis of the aviation incidents, Eurocontrol experts had selected nine ergonomic factors (stress, fatigue, mental workload, situation awareness – (SA), attention, vigilance, communication, teamwork and trust) which affect the pilots’ performance. In the previous article [1], was proposed a hybrid model (mathematical - heuristic), which is suitable for the study of HPE, because the mathematical part could be applied to study the physiological ergonomic factors (workload, stress, mental fatigue, situation awareness, attention and vigilance), based on physiological measurements, while the heuristic part could be used to analyze the psychosocial ergonomic factors (trust, teamwork and communication) determined by direct observations, questionnaires studies and incident report analysis. The aim of this paper is to validate the proposed mathematical model, through physiological measurements (ECG, EEG, RR and eye tracking) for ergonomic less studied factors (according to the literature analysis): Fatigue, Attention and Vigilance. Using a single pilot, the measurements were conducted in three distinct scenarios on the King Air C90 simulator at INCAS - Strejnicu. The findings demonstrated that the physiological parameters were impacted by the difficulty of the flights.