The mental workload of a ship’s navigator using heart rate variability

Abstract

A human navigator attempts to handle the ship for safe navigation by judging navigational information on own ship’s condition, targets and current‐wind effects. He/she has the responsibility of human lives and the economic values to judge. The human navigator maintains high mental workload during the navigational watch keeping. Therefore, we need to develop a support system to reduce the mental workload with human‐system cooperation based on the navigator’s KANSEI, and we must research an index to assess the mental workload for the first step, as the research on the KANSEI of ship’s navigator is not yet available in the world. In addition we depend on the professional’s experience for the assessment. The purpose of this paper is to find characteristics of the mental workload using heart rate variability. The experiment is carried out in six types of sea area on the west side of Japan. The subject is the chief officer of a training ship at Kobe University.

Citation

Murai, K., Hayashi, Y., Nagata, N. and Inokuchi, S. (2004), "The mental workload of a ship’s navigator using heart rate variability", Interactive Technology and Smart Education, Vol. 1 No. 2, pp. 127-133. https://doi.org/10.1108/17415650480000018