An automated approach for task evaluation using EEG signals

Critical task and cognition-based environments, such as in military and defense operations, aviation user-technology interaction evaluation on UI, understanding intuitiveness of a hardware model or software toolkit, etc. require an assessment of how much a particular task is generating mental workload on a user. This is necessary for understanding how those tasks, operations, and activities can be improvised and made better suited for the users so that they reduce the mental workload on the individual and the operators can use them with ease and less difficulty. However, a particular task can be gauged by a user as simple while for others it may be difficult. Understanding the complexity of a particular task can only be done on user level and we propose to do this by understanding the mental workload (MWL) generated on an operator while performing a task which requires processing a lot of information to get the task done. In this work, we have proposed an experimental setup which replicates modern day workload on doing regular day job tasks. We propose an approach to automatically evaluate the task complexity perceived by an individual by using electroencephalogram (EEG) data of a user during operation. Few crucial steps that are addressed in this work include extraction and optimization of different features and selection of relevant features for dimensionality reduction and using supervised machine learning techniques. In addition to this, performance results of the classifiers are compared using all features and also using only the selected features. From the results, it can be inferred that machine learning algorithms perform better as compared to traditional approaches for mental workload estimation.