Reducing flight upset risk and startle response: A study of the wake vortex alert with licensed commercial pilots.

The study aimed at investigating the impact of an innovative Wake Vortex Alert (WVA) avionics on pilots' operation and mental states, intending to improve aviation safety by mitigating the risks associated with wake vortex encounters (WVEs). Wake vortices, generated by jet aircraft, pose a significant hazard to trailing or crossing aircrafts. Despite existing separation rules, incidents involving WVEs continue to occur, especially affecting smaller aircrafts like business jets, resulting in aircraft upsets and occasional cabin injuries.

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.

How Neurophysiological Measures Can be Used to Enhance the Evaluation of Remote Tower Solutions.

New solutions in operational environments are often, among objective measurements, evaluated by using subjective assessment and judgment from experts. Anyhow, it has been demonstrated that subjective measures suffer from poor resolution due to a high intra and inter-operator variability. Also, performance measures, if available, could provide just partial information, since an operator could achieve the same performance but experiencing a different workload.

EEG-Based Mental Workload Neurometric to Evaluate the Impact of Different Traffic and Road Conditions in Real Driving Settings.

Car driving is considered a very complex activity, consisting of different concomitant tasks and subtasks, thus it is crucial to understand the impact of different factors, such as road complexity, traffic, dashboard devices, and external events on the driver's behavior and performance. For this reason, in particular situations the cognitive demand experienced by the driver could be very high, inducing an excessive experienced mental workload and consequently an increasing of error commission probability. In this regard, it has been demonstrated that human error is the main cause of the 57% of road accidents and a contributing factor in most of them.

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.

Human Factors and Neurophysiological Metrics in Air Traffic Control: A Critical Review.

This paper provides a focused and organized review of the research progress on neurophysiological indicators, also called "neurometrics," to show how they can effectively address some of the most important human factors (HFs) needs in the air traffic management (ATM) field. In order to better understand and highlight available opportunities of such neuroscientific applications, state of the art on the most involved HFs and related cognitive processes (e.g.

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.

Adaptive Automation Triggered by EEG-Based Mental Workload Index: A Passive Brain-Computer Interface Application in Realistic Air Traffic Control Environment.

(AA) is a promising approach to keep the task workload demand within appropriate levels in order to avoid both the - and conditions, hence enhancing the overall performance and safety of the human-machine system. The main issue on the use of AA is how to trigger the AA solutions without affecting the operative task. In this regard, (pBCI) systems are a good candidate to activate automation, since they are able to gather information about the covert behavior (e.

Reliability over time of EEG-based mental workload evaluation during Air Traffic Management (ATM) tasks.

Machine-learning approaches for mental workload (MW) estimation by using the user brain activity went through a rapid expansion in the last decades. In fact, these techniques allow now to measure the MW with a high time resolution (e.g.

Multi-scale analysis of the European airspace using network community detection.

We show that the European airspace can be represented as a multi-scale traffic network whose nodes are airports, sectors, or navigation points and links are defined and weighted according to the traffic of flights between the nodes. By using a unique database of the air traffic in the European airspace, we investigate the architecture of these networks with a special emphasis on their community structure. We propose that unsupervised network community detection algorithms can be used to monitor the current use of the airspace and improve it by guiding the design of new ones.

Safety cases for medical devices and health information technology: involving health-care organisations in the assurance of safety.

In the United Kingdom, there are more than 9000 reports of adverse events involving medical devices annually. The regulatory processes in Europe and in the United States have been challenged as to their ability to protect patients effectively from unreasonable risk and harm. Two of the major shortcomings of current practice include the lack of transparency in the safety certification process and the lack of involvement of service providers.

Design for reflection.

Since a few years, a number of academic papers have been proposing to shift from user-centered design to human-centered (or person) design. In this contribution, we discuss as the common tread underlying these works the idea that design should also address the reflective part of our human experience, and not only aim to maximize the experiential aspects. Our review is complemented with examples derived from the internet world and from ICT consumer products.