Physiology-based Operator Confidence Assessment System (PhOCAS)

Investigates and explores the solution space for physiologically-based emotion detection within the design and development of a Physiology-based Operator Confidence Assessment System (PhOCAS). The PhOCAS project uses UCF ISTs experience as experts on augmented cognition and physiological assessment for determining user state (such as workload) combined with SoarTechs intelligent systems capabilities to create an assessment system that can reliably induce and measure workload strain within a task-based scenario. The requirements for real-time measurement of an emotional correlate such as workload strain is threefold: the ability to reliably elicit the response, the identification of the appropriate physiological measure of the response, and the algorithmic processing required to determine if the response is truly present for the given conditions. To this, we add the practical requirement of correlating the response to the task critically and the users ability to adequately perform the mission given an emotional response. The PhOCAS program leverages our prior research and development in physiological state sensing, workload assessment modeling, and task offloading strategies, and extends it to the sensing and assessing of emotional strain during critical mission tasking.