Neurophysiological Vigilance Characterisation and Assessment: Laboratory and Realistic Validations Involving Professional Air Traffic Controllers

Vigilance degradation usually causes significant performance decrement. It is also considered the major factor causing the out-of-the-loop phenomenon (OOTL) occurrence. OOTL is strongly related to a high level of automation in operative contexts such as the Air Traffic Management (ATM), and it could...

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Autores principales: Sebastiani, Marika, Di Flumeri, Gianluca, Aricò, Pietro, Sciaraffa, Nicolina, Babiloni, Fabio, Borghini, Gianluca
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7016567/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31952181
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/brainsci10010048
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author Sebastiani, Marika
Di Flumeri, Gianluca
Aricò, Pietro
Sciaraffa, Nicolina
Babiloni, Fabio
Borghini, Gianluca
author_facet Sebastiani, Marika
Di Flumeri, Gianluca
Aricò, Pietro
Sciaraffa, Nicolina
Babiloni, Fabio
Borghini, Gianluca
author_sort Sebastiani, Marika
collection PubMed
description Vigilance degradation usually causes significant performance decrement. It is also considered the major factor causing the out-of-the-loop phenomenon (OOTL) occurrence. OOTL is strongly related to a high level of automation in operative contexts such as the Air Traffic Management (ATM), and it could lead to a negative impact on the Air Traffic Controllers’ (ATCOs) engagement. As a consequence, being able to monitor the ATCOs’ vigilance would be very important to prevent risky situations. In this context, the present study aimed to characterise and assess the vigilance level by using electroencephalographic (EEG) measures. The first study, involving 13 participants in laboratory settings allowed to find out the neurophysiological features mostly related to vigilance decrements. Those results were also confirmed under realistic ATM settings recruiting 10 professional ATCOs. The results demonstrated that (i) there was a significant performance decrement related to vigilance reduction; (ii) there were no substantial differences between the identified neurophysiological features in controlled and ecological settings, and the EEG-channel configuration defined in laboratory was able to discriminate and classify vigilance changes in ATCOs’ vigilance with high accuracy (up to 84%); (iii) the derived two EEG-channel configuration was able to assess vigilance variations reporting only slight accuracy reduction.
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spelling pubmed-70165672020-03-04 Neurophysiological Vigilance Characterisation and Assessment: Laboratory and Realistic Validations Involving Professional Air Traffic Controllers Sebastiani, Marika Di Flumeri, Gianluca Aricò, Pietro Sciaraffa, Nicolina Babiloni, Fabio Borghini, Gianluca Brain Sci Article Vigilance degradation usually causes significant performance decrement. It is also considered the major factor causing the out-of-the-loop phenomenon (OOTL) occurrence. OOTL is strongly related to a high level of automation in operative contexts such as the Air Traffic Management (ATM), and it could lead to a negative impact on the Air Traffic Controllers’ (ATCOs) engagement. As a consequence, being able to monitor the ATCOs’ vigilance would be very important to prevent risky situations. In this context, the present study aimed to characterise and assess the vigilance level by using electroencephalographic (EEG) measures. The first study, involving 13 participants in laboratory settings allowed to find out the neurophysiological features mostly related to vigilance decrements. Those results were also confirmed under realistic ATM settings recruiting 10 professional ATCOs. The results demonstrated that (i) there was a significant performance decrement related to vigilance reduction; (ii) there were no substantial differences between the identified neurophysiological features in controlled and ecological settings, and the EEG-channel configuration defined in laboratory was able to discriminate and classify vigilance changes in ATCOs’ vigilance with high accuracy (up to 84%); (iii) the derived two EEG-channel configuration was able to assess vigilance variations reporting only slight accuracy reduction. MDPI 2020-01-15 /pmc/articles/PMC7016567/ /pubmed/31952181 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/brainsci10010048 Text en © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Sebastiani, Marika
Di Flumeri, Gianluca
Aricò, Pietro
Sciaraffa, Nicolina
Babiloni, Fabio
Borghini, Gianluca
Neurophysiological Vigilance Characterisation and Assessment: Laboratory and Realistic Validations Involving Professional Air Traffic Controllers
title Neurophysiological Vigilance Characterisation and Assessment: Laboratory and Realistic Validations Involving Professional Air Traffic Controllers
title_full Neurophysiological Vigilance Characterisation and Assessment: Laboratory and Realistic Validations Involving Professional Air Traffic Controllers
title_fullStr Neurophysiological Vigilance Characterisation and Assessment: Laboratory and Realistic Validations Involving Professional Air Traffic Controllers
title_full_unstemmed Neurophysiological Vigilance Characterisation and Assessment: Laboratory and Realistic Validations Involving Professional Air Traffic Controllers
title_short Neurophysiological Vigilance Characterisation and Assessment: Laboratory and Realistic Validations Involving Professional Air Traffic Controllers
title_sort neurophysiological vigilance characterisation and assessment: laboratory and realistic validations involving professional air traffic controllers
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7016567/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31952181
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/brainsci10010048
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