Preliminary study of pilot stress and mental workload monitoring through physiological signals

Abstract

The aviation industry is moving towards single-pilot operations due to increased operating expenses and a shortage of pilots. The necessity of developing a digital cockpit assistant leads to discovering methods to assess the stress and mental workload of pilots. This study used twenty-eight healthy volunteers to conduct preliminary computerised cognitive tasks while recording their physiological data for PPG, EDA, and temperature under four different stress and workload situations. The results highlight how they are sensible to a binary classification between a relaxed and more cognitively demanding condition.