Determining importance of physiological parameters and methods of their evaluation for classification of pilots psychophysiological condition

At present, several studies exist describing the relevance of human factor in air transport with main focus on pilots and flight safety. Within such studies, monitoring of physiological functions is used. There are lot of physiological parameters and methods of their assessment; however, they are mostly based on principles originating from clinical practice. Yet, sensitivity and specificity of these methods with regard to assessment of aviation professionals — pilots is unknown. Therefore, this paper is oriented towards description of the most common methods for physiological parameters assessment. The paper also describes evaluation methods, which are on experimental level in terms of physiological data evaluation, namely recurrent quantification analysis. Within the research carried out, sample group of pilots was subjected to measurement for evaluation of their psychophysiological condition and performance. Selected evaluation methods were applied on the collected data and importance of those parameters and methods, which provided best classification for level of psychophysiological stress, was evaluated by means of statistical analyses. The results indicate that the most important physiological parameter for psychophysiological condition assessment of pilots is heart electrical activity where the possibility to perform signal processing whilst preserving its importance is provided by linear methods in the time and frequency domain, or alternatively by non-linear methods utilizing recurrent quantification analysis.