The Complementary Role of Activity Context in the Mental Workload Evaluation of Helicopter Pilots: A Multi-tasking Learning Approach

Ioannis Bargiotas, Alice Nicolaï, Pierre-Paul Vidal, Christophe Labourdette, Nicolas Vayatis, Stéphane Buffat

Abstract: Manifestations of increasing mental demands may be related to the task’s context. Additionally, to fundamental physiological changes, the workload may be also characterized sometimes by contextual task-related elements. We aimed to investigate the workload of helicopter pilots and develop predictive models related to the tasks’ context. Eight pilots completed an unknown case-scenario (~1 h) in a helicopter simulator. The scenario included changing mission during flight and receiving/transferring an injured subject to the near hospital. We selected interesting scenario’s periods/“tasks” (e.g., searching hospital, urgent landing) where pilots gave oral evaluations (0–100). Performed tasks had various contexts. We developed a multitasking learning approach to “pool together” all tasks because some of them, although different, may carry useful information about others, so they should neither be merged nor be processed totally independently. Interestingly, it seems that physiological and contextual parameters change order of descriptive power, depending on the task.