Measuring Mental Workload and Heart Rate Variability of Officers During Different Navigation Conditions

Abstract

Mental workload (MWL) has a negative effect on the functional states of watchkeeping officers that ultimately causes collisions and groundings at sea. The aim of this study is to measure the MWL of officers during different navigation conditions. This study was conducted in a bridge simulator with 11 participants. Heart rate variability (HRV) measurements were taken during the 4 steps which have different difficulty levels and subjective assessments were taken at the end of each step by using NASA-TLX. The results of the measurements showed that different levels of navigation tasks caused significantly different levels of MWL and HRV values and MWL and HRV increased when task difficulty increased. Additionally, the correlation between MWL perceived by the participants and the heart rate variability values of the participants was found statistically significant. This study provides an example of predicting MWL for routine navigation operations by using physiological measures in maritime transportation.

Keywords

• Heart rate variability
• Mental workload
• NASA-TLX
• Ship navigation

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