Instantaneous mental workload assessment using time–frequency analysis and semi-supervised learning

The real-time assessment of mental workload (MWL) is critical for development of intelligent human–machine cooperative systems in various safety–critical applications. Although data-driven machine learning (ML) approach has shown promise in MWL recognition, there is still difficulty in acquiring a sufficient number of labeled data to train the ML models. This paper proposes a semi-supervised extreme learning machine (SS-ELM) algorithm for MWL pattern classification requiring only a small number of labeled data. The measured data analysis results show that the proposed SS-ELM paradigm can effectively improve the accuracy and efficiency of MWL classification and thus provide a competitive ML approach to utilizing a large number of unlabeled data which are available in many real-world applications.