18th IAA Humans in Space Symposium (2011)
Developing Real-time Tools for In-Situ Human Performance Assessment
R. McCann. NASA
In next-generation deep-space missions, astronauts are going to have to perform many
more operations autonomously than they do in today’s missions, where ground support is
available virtually instantaneously. Crew roles, activities, and workload will have to be
carefully monitored and evaluated in order to flexibly adjust and allocate operational
functions and responsibilities among mixed teams of crewmembers and intelligent
software agents. I will discuss the results of an iterative research and development
project that is building a predictive human modeling and simulation tool from empirical
measures of operator performance, such as eye movement recordings and manual key
presses, collected while the operators perform representative spacecraft tasks in a parttask ground-based simulation. I will discuss how the program could be directed to
support the development of a robust, noninvasive performance-measurement tool suite
that would provide a validated, real-time operator performance assessment capability.
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