EEG-based Mental Workload and Stress Recognition of Crew Members in Maritime Virtual Simulator: A Case Study

Abstract

Many studies have shown that the majority of maritime accidents/incidents are attributed to human errors as the initiating cause. Efforts have been made to study human factors that can result in a safer maritime transportation. Among all techniques, Electroencephalogram (EEG) has the advantages such as high time resolution, possibility to continuously monitor brain states with high accuracy, recognition of human mental workload, emotion, stress, vigilance, etc. In this paper, we designed and carried out an experiment to collect the EEG signals to study stress and sharing of the mental workload among crew members during collaboration tasks performance on the ship's bridge virtual simulator. Four maritime trainees were monitored in the experiment. Each of them had a role such as an officer on watch, captain, pilot, or steersman. The results show that the captain had the highest stress and workload. However, the other three trainees experienced low workload and stress due to shared work and responsibility. The EEG is a promising evaluation tool to be used in the human factors study in the maritime domain.

Applications of EEG indices for the quantification of human cognitive performance: A systematic review and bibliometric analysis

“…That study concluded that only FD could be used to evaluate human mental workload. Several computational intelligence algorithms have been used to classify and detect mental workload levels, such as SVM [72,138,[190][191][192], ANN [193][194][195], and random forest (RF) [196].…”

“…Emotions play an important role in overall human performance because they significantly affect cognitive functioning, decision-making, and individual performance [132,218]. Hence, understanding human feelings and emotions in the workplace is essential in providing safe working environments, especially in high-risk work such as maritime, aviation, and site construction [192,219]. Stress results from emotional pressure [220]; consequently, emotions and stress are tightly correlated [221].…”

The potential mental health effects of remote control in an autonomous maritime world

“…Examples what can be studied to measure stress are salivary cortisol and heart rate (Main, Wolkow, and Chambers 2017;Main and Chambers 2015). Measuring electroencephalography (i.e., EEG) is also another method, which observes the electrical activity within the human brain for stress (Liu et al 2017). This, however, is an example of high resolutions achieved, but may not be as applicable to real-world experiments as, for example heart rate.…”

Human Factor in Navigation: Overview of Cognitive Load Measurement during Simulated Navigational Tasks

“…Nevertheless, this method provides insight into the mind process, from which the cognitive load [4] and psycho-physical state (emotions) [16] of the participants can be understood. Noise in the raw data is induced by invasive multi-wire sensors; and procedures in which sampling of the participant's stress hormone cortisol [8] was found disturbing and stressful, affecting the clarity of the final results.…”