Developing a feedback system to augment monitoring performance of aircraft pilots

As a supervisor of a highly automated technical system, a human operator is the “ultima ratio” in abnormal situations that cannot be handled by the automation. Therefore, a human operator must adequately monitor the automated system throughout the entire operation. Unfortunately, humans tend to fall prey to a couple of demons leading to inadequate monitoring behavior, such as boredom, attentional tunneling or perservation. As a consequence, the human might lose situation awareness and be unable to detect and handle an abnormal situation in the given amount time. In this paper, we present a feedback system to augment monitoring performance on the part of an aircraft pilot. The feedback system has been developed under the umbrella of the European research and development project A-PiMod, where novel team-centered concepts for pilot-automation interaction are investigated.