Functional Near Infrared Imaging for Cognitive Event Detection during Target Discrimination in Military Imagery

The work done in Phase I demonstrated using cognitive brain signals to determine the output of a discrimination task. No attempt was made to feed these signals back into the system to help the user better perform the discrimination task. The work to be done in Phase II focuses on using cognitive brain signals to adapt and manipulate the tasking of a user so as to improve their overall performances on the tasks presented to them. To do so, the team will build two different types of cognitive sensing devices and integrate them into the InfoCockpit, developed at the University of Virginia specifically for testing this type of closed-loop system. Once demonstrated, several other cognitive sensing units will be built for Department of Defense sponsors and contractors. The ultimate goal of the ISIS program is to produce an integrated platform in which cognitive state sensing is used for workload scheduling and balancing. This integration should be developed such that it is easily migrated to other domains and/or applications. This effort in Phase II will involve not just the prime contractor, NOVASOL, but also the University of Virginia and Eye Response Technologies, Inc. both of whom will serve as sub-contractors.