Category Archives: Publication

New article in Applied Ergonomics – The effect of flight phase on electrodermal activity and gaze behavior: A simulator study

Our article “The effect of flight phase on electrodermal activity and gaze behavior: A simulator study” has been accepted for publication in the journal Applied Ergonomics:

Luis Lutnyk, David Rudi, Victor R. Schinazi, Peter Kiefer, Martin Raubal (2022). The effect of flight phase on electrodermal activity and gaze behavior: A simulator study , Applied Ergonomics, Volume 109, DOI: 10.1016/j.apergo.2023.103989 .

Highlights:

• Unobtrusive technologies were used to record electrodermal activity and gaze behavior in an instrument failure scenario.
• Participants’ electrodermal activity increased significantly during high workload phases of the failure scenario.
• AOI-based & non-AOI eye tracking metrics show significant differences when a secondary task needs to be solved during flight.
• The observed measures show great potential for future cockpits that can provide assistance based on the sensed pilot state.

Abstract. Current advances in airplane cockpit design and layout are often driven by a need to improve the pilot’s awareness of the aircraft’s state. This involves an improvement in the flow of information from aircraft to pilot. However, providing the aircraft with information on the pilot’s state remains an open challenge. This work takes a first step towards determining the pilot’s state based on biosensor data. We conducted a simulator study to record participants’ electrodermal activity and gaze behavior, indicating pilot state changes during three distinct flight phases in an instrument failure scenario. The results show a significant difference in these psychophysiological measures between a phase of regular flight, the incident phase, and a phase with an additional troubleshooting task after the failure. The differences in the observed measures suggest great potential for a pilot-aware cockpit that can provide assistance based on the sensed pilot state.

The article has been published as Open Access and you can get the PDF here:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003687023000273

The publication is part of PEGGASUS. This project has received funding from the Clean Sky 2 Joint Undertaking under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 821461

Co-authored paper on PEGGASUS at SPIE Photonics West

A joint paper with our partners at CSEM on the eye tracking hard- and software developed in PEGGASUS was published on the SPIE digital library. We encourage you to take a deep dive into the technological achievements of PEGGASUS:

“The pipeline, which is a combination of data-driven and analytics approaches, runs in real time at 60 fps with a latency of about 32ms. The eye gaze estimation error was evaluated in terms of the point of regard distance error with respect to the 3D point location. An average error of less than 1.1cm was achieved over 28 gaze points representing the cockpit instruments placed at about 80-110cm from the participants’ eyes.”

Engin Türetkin, Sareh Saeedi, Siavash Bigdeli, Patrick Stadelmann, Nicolas Cantale, Luis Lutnyk, Martin Raubal, Andrea L. Dunbar (2022). Real time eye gaze tracking for human machine interaction in the cockpit In AI and Optical Data Sciences III (Vol. 12019, pp. 24-33). SPIE..

The paper was presented at SPIE’s Photonics West conference at San Francisco’s Moscone Center.

Find the full text and presentation video here: https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2607434

The publication is part of PEGGASUS. This project has received funding from the Clean Sky 2 Joint Undertaking under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 821461

Workshop Paper published from ETAVI 2020

Our paper “Towards Pilot-Aware Cockpits” has been published in the proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Eye-Tracking in Aviation (ETAVI 2020):

Lutnyk L., Rudi D., and Raubal M. (2020). Towards Pilot-​Aware Cockpits. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Eye-​Tracking in Aviation (ETAVI 2020), ETH Zurich. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000407661

Abstract. Eye tracking has a longstanding history in aviation research. Amongst others it has been employed to bring pilots back “in the loop”, i.e., create a better awareness of the flight situation. Interestingly, there exists only little research in this context that evaluates the application of machine learning algorithms to model pilots’ understanding of the aircraft’s state and their situation awareness. Machine learning models could be trained to differentiate between normal and abnormal patterns with regard to pilots’ eye movements, control inputs, and data from other psychophysiological sensors, such as heart rate or blood pressure. Moreover, when the system recognizes an abnormal pattern, it could provide situation specific assistance to bring pilots back in the loop. This paper discusses when pilots benefit from such a pilot-aware system, and explores the technical and user oriented requirements for implementing this system.

Edit. The publication is part of PEGGASUS. This project has received funding from the Clean Sky 2 Joint Undertaking under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 821461