Abstract
Manifestations of increasing mental demands may be related to the task’s context. Additionally, to fundamental physiological changes, the workload may be also characterized sometimes by contextual task-related elements. We aimed to investigate the workload of helicopter pilots and develop predictive models related to the tasks’ context. Eight pilots completed an unknown case-scenario (~1 h) in a helicopter simulator. The scenario included changing mission during flight and receiving/transferring an injured subject to the near hospital. We selected interesting scenario’s periods/“tasks” (e.g., searching hospital, urgent landing) where pilots gave oral evaluations (0–100). Performed tasks had various contexts. We developed a multitasking learning approach to “pool together” all tasks because some of them, although different, may carry useful information about others, so they should neither be merged nor be processed totally independently. Interestingly, it seems that physiological and contextual parameters change order of descriptive power, depending on the task.
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Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank the partners of work-package 1.6, Cockpit centered on the crew and Method and tools for the assessment of the future cockpit for helicopters of the IKKY program, and in particular Serge Couvet, David Hartnagel, and Denis Demain for their very active participation. We also wish to express our gratitude to the French Gendarmerie air force and in particular the SAG Villacoublay.
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Bargiotas, I., Nicolaï, A., Vidal, PP., Labourdette, C., Vayatis, N., Buffat, S. (2019). The Complementary Role of Activity Context in the Mental Workload Evaluation of Helicopter Pilots: A Multi-tasking Learning Approach. In: Longo, L., Leva, M. (eds) Human Mental Workload: Models and Applications. H-WORKLOAD 2018. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1012. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14273-5_13
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