Machine Detection of Operationally Significant Cognitive Events for C4ISR

"The interface between human and machine has classically been one-sided. Humans command machines with little assistance offered by the machine besides feedback regarding current status of the command execution. With recent advances in computational powerand analytical techniques, a more collaborative relationship between the machine and its user can occur. This relationship would be particularly helpful in areas where vigilance and situational awareness of a human operator are necessary for successfultask completion. A machine capable of detecting cognitively significant events would determine when military personnel are incapacitated or overloaded due to a high stress level associated with their duties. It would then take action when this situationoccurs. This project will establish that these operationally significant cognitive events can be captured in an autonomous fashion through the use of an eye-tracking system. This will involve conducting a laboratory experiment closely analogous to areal-world military situation to show that cognitive events can be detected in a statistically significant fashion through eye movement variables, such as scan path, pupil dilation, and eye blink frequency measures. Completion of this SBIR would result ina device that represents one of the first examples of the successful application of ubiquitous computing technology in a real-world environment. This technology could readily be applied to many o