It is of great importance to gain insight into the mental states of operators in complex system environments such as control rooms. Previous research has shown that mental states such as workload and alertness of operators have an influence on performance. And that these states can lead to human errors with all the consequences. At the moment, however, no sensors are being used that measure human functioning in interaction with high-tech systems. A light will illuminate if the system is not functioning. But no light goes on if the person or the team does not function properly and threatens to fail. For example, an operator is overloaded, and bored and as a result may be less alert or concentrated.
A promising innovation is to base the workload and alertness of a team of operators on brain activity, measured with a wearable Brain-Computer Interface (BCI). Another application concerns (online) learning situations in which the BCIs are used to indicate the mental state of students in order to improve education.
The aim of the ALERT project is to design a plug & play BCI system that can measure the workload and alertness of multiple operators (use case: Control rooms) and multiple students (use case: Learning environment) simultaneously. This system will collect neurophysiological data by means of sensors, and process this data using smart algorithms to determine characteristics of workload/alertness. These characteristics can be selected for each specific application.
The consortium consists of five partners: Thales Nederland, ANT International, Artinis Medical Systems, Noldus Information Technology and the University of Twente.
The experiments for this project are being conducted in the BCI testbed within the BMS Lab of the University of Twente.
Partners
In the Efro Alert project, we worked together with:
