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Researchers at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras have discovered a methodology to find out whether or not a worker has the psychological capability to handle a crisis in a manufacturing unit or different high-stress jobs by measuring their brainwaves utilizing an electroencephalogram (EEG).
According to a study printed within the Journal of Computers and Computer Engineering, the researchers discovered that EEG, a method that measures mind exercise, can measure the cognitive workload of human operators in a chemical plant management room.
EEG entails inserting sensors on the scalp of the topic and measuring brainwave exercise. The IIT research has discovered that measuring brainwaves can assist in assessing the aptitude of a person to answer an emergency in real-time, which, in flip, may stop accidents and mishaps.
According to the group, the research has proven the potential of EEG to evaluate the cognitive workload of human operators in a chemical plant management room. The cognitive workload is the extent of measurable psychological effort that’s expended by a person to carry out a activity. High cognitive workload state of employees makes them liable to commit errors that can result in accidents.
“Human errors are the cause of nearly 70 per cent of industrial accidents, the world over. Human errors, whether at the planning or execution stage, depend not only on the skill of the worker but also on his or her mental state and sharpness at that time. Anybody’s performance will become error-prone if there is a mismatch between the demands of the task which the person is responsible and their ability at that moment to handle it,” stated Rajagopalan Srinivasan, professor at Department of Chemical Engineering, IIT Madras.
“Such a mismatch leads to high cognitive workload in human operators, often a precursor to poor performance. All our thoughts and activities are driven by electrical signals between the cells in our brain called brainwaves, which occur at different frequencies and are called alpha, beta, gamma, theta and delta. The relative magnitudes of these waves along with their variation are a signature of our thought process and current mental state,” he added.
The research group affixed sensors to the heads of six contributors and had them carry out eight duties every.
“The nature of the tasks was to monitor a typical industrial section for any disturbances which if not controlled, by the participant, in a given time frame can lead to accidents. Thus, the nature of the job required them to understand the plant (industrial section) behaviour and take appropriate decisions and actions if any disturbance occurred. The disturbance increased their cognitive workload, and only if the correct decision was made, did the cognitive workload reduce.
“Their results showed that the amount of Theta Waves could identify any mismatch between the worker’s mental model of the process and the actual plant behaviour during abnormal situations. This makes sense because the ‘theta band’ of brainwaves has been thought to be responsible for the control process of working memory functions,” he stated.
The institute plans to study potential of those EEG strategies to enhance human efficiency in numerous high-risk industries, thus opening a new paradigm to industrial security and its relation to the real-time psychological state of the worker.
“The EEG based approach can provide information about the cognitive workload of operators during training, which in turn can be used to fine-tune the training process itself. It can also provide targeted cues during learning, to improve the overall effectiveness of training,” Srinivasan stated.
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