A company called Aptima is developing a tool to measure human performance that will predict when people, such as pilots or air traffic controllers, are becoming so task saturated that they’re unable to recognize they are overwhelmed. Aptima's’s human-system performance assessment (HSPA) is “being experimentally validated at the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson AFB,” CEO Mike Paley told AIN.

HSPA could someday be integrated into a cockpit or a controller workstation and serve as an alerting function that tells automation to reassign or shed tasks before human overload compromises performance. In simulated ATC or flight operations, the HSPA testing collects raw data from sensors monitoring eye movement, heart rate, respiration and neural activity. An algorithm then interprets the data and highlights the relationship between human performance, stressors and situational demands.

“In a training environment, HSPA could optimize the training for better performance so we don’t either overwhelm the students or bore them,” Paley said. “The goal isn’t to remove the human from the loop but to help offload non-essential tasks.”