Evaluation of alertness and mental fatigue among participants of simulated flight sessions

Performing complex activities that accompany piloting an airplane requires a lot of concentration, coordination and reflex from the pilots. Additionally, the responsibility that lies on a person that controls any kind of flying platform can lead to the increased amount of pressure and stress. Considering all of the aforementioned conditions, it is essential to provide a system capable of evaluating and monitoring of pilot's alertness and mental fatigue during different phases of flight. Such solution can potentially drastically improve the efficiency of flight operating staff, which may lead to the increase in the overall flight safety. In this study we attempt to propose the statistical measures allowing to evaluate mental parameters of airplane pilots during the simulated flight sessions. Thanks to that, a flight aiding solution can be proposed, which would be capable of monitoring and alerting of any potentially dangerous cases of pilot's decreased concentration or increased weariness. Additionally, the specific requirements of different flight phases could be taken into consideration. The electroencephalography (EEG) is one of the most popular technologies used for the recording and monitoring of brain bioelectrical activity. Such activity can then be properly processed and used for the task of statistical description of mental states required for this research. For experiment presented in this article, the Emotiv EPOC+ Scientific Contextual EEG devices were used. Such apparatus provides 14 EEG channels positioned with the accordance to the standard 10-20 electrode placement system. Very important features of the EPOC+ headsets are their portability and ease of montage which are critical in this study. In the research a group of 5 people, with no or little previous experience with flight simulators, participated in an approximately 3 hour long session each. During that time they were asked to continuously perform a piloting sequence which consisted of 3 flight phases: starting (approx. 1 minute), flight (approx. 6 minutes, 4 turns) and landing (approx. 1 minute). As a result about 15 full flight sequences for each subject were obtained and later used for the purpose of alertness and mental fatigue evaluation. All experiments were performed on the Elite S812 FNPT II and Elite S923 FNPT II MCC flight simulators.