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ABSTRACT
Human error is still one of the most frequent causes of catastrophes and ecological disasters. The main reason is that the monitoring systems concern only the state of the processes whereas human contribution to the overall performance of the system is left unsupervised. Since the control instruments are automated to a large extent, a human – operator becomes a passive observer of the supervised system, which results in weariness and vigilance drop. This, he may not notice important changes of indications causing financial or ecological consequences and a threat to human life.
It therefore is crucial to assure that the operator’s conscious brain is involved in an active system supervising over the whole work time period. It is possible to measure indirectly the level of the operator’s conscious brain involvement using eye motility analysis. Although there are capable sensors available on the market, a complex solution enabling transformation, analysis and reasoning based on measured signals still does not exist. In large control rooms, wiring the operator to the central system is a serious limitation of his mobility and disables his operation. Utilization of wireless technology becomes essential.
Blue Eyes is intended to be the complex solution for monitoring and recording the operator’s conscious brain involvement as well as his Physiological condition. This required designing a Personal Area Network linking all the Operators and the supervising system. As the operator using his sight and hearing senses the state of the controlled system, the supervising system will look after his physiological condition.
AIM
1) To design smarter devices
2) To create devices with emotional intelligence
3) To create computational devices with perceptual abilities
The idea of giving computers personality or, more accurately, emotional intelligence" may seem creepy, but technologists say such machines would offer important advantages.
De-spite their lightning speed and awesome powers of computation, today's PCs are essentially deaf, dumb, and blind. They can't see you, they can't hear you, and they certainly don't care a whit how you feel. Every computer user knows the frustration of nonsensical error messages, buggy software, and abrupt system crashes. We might berate the computer as if it were an unruly child, but, of course, the machine can't respond. "It's ironic that people feel like dummies in front of their computers, when in fact the computer is the dummy," says Rosalind Picard, a computer science professor at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge.
A computer endowed with emotional intelligence, on the other hand, could recognize when its operator is feeling angry or frustrated and try to respond in an appropriate fashion. Such a computer might slow down or replay a tutorial program for a confused student, or recognize when a designer is burned out and suggest he take a break. It could even play a recording of Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" if it sensed anxiety or serve up a rousing Springsteen anthem if it detected lethargy. The possible applications of "emotion technology" extend far beyond the desktop. A car equipped with an affective computing system could recognize when a driver is feeling drowsy and ad-vise her to pull over, or it might sense when a stressed-out motorist is about to explode and warn him to slow down and cool off.
These machines have got their own personality and this personality depends upon the moods of the user.
INTRODUCTION
BlueEyes system provides technical means for monitoring and recording the operator’s basic physiological parameters. The most important parameter is saccadic activity1, which enables the system to monitor the status of the operator’s visual attention along with head acceleration, which accompanies large displacement of the visual axis (saccades larger than 15 degrees). Complex industrial environment can create a danger of exposing the operator to toxic substances, which can affect his cardiac, circulatory and pulmonary systems. Thus, on the grounds of plethysmographic signal taken from the forehead skin surface, the system computes heart beat rate and blood oxygenation.
[Saccades are rapid eye jumps to new locations within a visual environment assigned predominantly by the conscious attention process.]
The BlueEyes system checks above parameters against abnormal (e.g. a low level of blood oxygenation or a high pulse rate) or undesirable (e.g. a longer period of lowered visual attention) values and triggers user-defined alarms when necessary. Quite often in an emergency situation operator speak to themselves expressing their surprise or stating verbally the problem. Therefore, the operator’s voice, physiological parameters and an overall view of the operating room are recorded. This helps to reconstruct the course of operators’ work and provides data for long-term analysis.
BlueEyes consists of a mobile measuring device and a central analytical system. The mobile device is integrated with Bluetooth module providing wireless interface between sensors worn by the operator and the central unit. ID cards assigned to each of the operators and adequate user profiles on the central unit side provide necessary data personalization so different people can use a single mobile device (called hereafter DAU – Data Acquisition Unit). The overall system diagram is shown in Figure 1. The tasks of the mobile Data Acquisition Unit are to maintain Bluetooth connections, to get information from the sensor and sending it over the wireless connection, to deliver the alarm messages sent from the Central System Unit to the operator and handle personalized ID cards. Central System Unit maintains the other side of the Bluetooth connection, buffers incoming sensor data, performs on-line data analysis, records the conclusions for further exploration and provides visualization interface.
The task of the mobile Data Acquisition Unit are to maintain Bluetooth connection, to get information from the sensor and sending it over the wireless connection ,to deliver the alarm messages sent from the Central System Unit to the operator and handle personalized ID cards. Central System Unit maintains the other side of the Bluetooth connection, buffers incoming sensor data, performs on-line data analysis, records the conclusion for further exploration and provides visualization interface.
PERFORMANCE REQUIREMENTS
The portable nature of the mobile unit results in a number of performance requirements. As the device is intended to run on batteries, low power consumption is the most important constraint. Moreover, it is necessary to assure proper timing while receiving and transmitting sensor signals. To make the operation comfortable the device should be lightweight and electrically safe. Finally the use of standard and inexpensive IC’s will keep the price of the device at relatively low level.
The priority of the central unit is to provide real-time buffering and incoming sensor signals and semi-real-time processing of the data, which requires speed-optimizes filtering and reasoning algorithms. Moreover, the design should assure the possibility of distributing the processing among two or more central unit nodes (e.g. to offload the database system related tasks to a dedicated server).
DESIGN METHODOLOGIES
In creating the BlueEyes system a waterfall software development model was used since it is suitable for unrepeatable and explorative projects. During the course of the development UML standard notations were used. They facilitate communication between team members, all the ideas are clearly expressed by means of various diagrams, which is a sound base for further development.
The results of the functional design phase were documented on use case diagrams. During the low-level design stage the whole systems was divided into five main modules. Each of them has an independent, well-defined functional interface providing precise description of the services offered to the other modules. All the interfaces are documented on UML class, interaction and state diagrams. At this point each of the modules can be assigned to a team member, implemented and tested in parallel. The last stage of the project is the integrated system testing.
INNOVATIVE IDEAS
The unique feature of our system relies on the possibility of monitoring the operator’s higher brain functions involved in the acquisition of the information from the visual environment. The wireless link between the sensors worn by the operator and the supervising system offers new approach to system overall reliability and safety. This gives a possibility to design a supervising module whose role is to assure the proper quality of the system performance. The new possibilities can cover such areas as industry, transportation (by air, by road and by sea), military command centers or operating theaters (anesthesiologists).
IMPLEMANTATION OF BLUE EYES TECHNOLOGY
During the functional design phase we used UML standard use case notation, which shows the functions the system offers to particular users. BlueEyes has three groups of users:
Operators
Supervisors
System Administrators
Operator is a person whose physiological parameters are supervised. The operator wears the DAU. The only functions offered to that user are authorization in the system and receiving alarm alerts. Such limited functionality assures the device does not disturb the work of the operator
Authorization – the function is used when the operator’s duty starts. After inserting his personal ID card into the mobile device and entering proper PIN code the device will start listening for incoming Bluetooth connections. Once the connection has been established and authorization process has succeeded (the PIN code is correct) central system starts monitoring the operator’s physiological parameters. The authorization process shall be repeated after reinserting the ID card. It is not, however, required on reestablishing Bluetooth connection.
Receiving alerts – the function supplies the operator with the information about the most important alerts regarding his or his co-workers’ condition and mobile device state (e.g. connection lost, battery low). Alarms are signaled by using a beeper, earphone providing central system sound feedback and a small alphanumeric LCD display, which shows more detailed information.
Supervisor is a person responsible for analyzing operators’ condition and performance. The supervisor receives tools for inspecting present values of the parameters (On-line browsing) as well as browsing the results of long-term analysis (Off-line browsing).
During the on-line browsing it is possible to watch a list of currently working operators and the status of their mobile devices. Selecting one of the operators enables the supervisor to check the operator’s current physiological condition (e.g. a pie chart showing active brain involvement) and a history of alarms regarding the operator. All new incoming alerts are displayed immediately so that the supervisor is able to react fast. However, the presence of the human supervisor is not necessary since the system is equipped with reasoning algorithms and can trigger user-defined actions (e.g. to inform the operator’s co-workers).
During off-line browsing it is possible to reconstruct the course of the operator’s duty with all the physiological parameters, audio and video data. A comprehensive data analysis can be performed enabling the supervisor to draw conclusions on operator’s overall performance and competency (e.g. for working night shifts).
System Administrator is a user that maintains the system. The administrator delivers tools for adding new operators to the database, defining alarm conditions,
DATA ACQUISITION UNIT (DAU)
This section deals with the hardware part of the BlueEyes system with regard to the physiological data sensor, the DAU hardware components and the microcontroller software.
PHYSIOLOGICAL DATA SENSOR
To provide the Data Acquisition Unit with necessary physiological data an off-shelf eye movement sensor – Jazz Multisensor is used. It supplies raw digital data regarding eye position, the level of blood oxygenation, acceleration along horizontal and vertical axes and ambient light intensity. Eye movement is measured using direct infrared oculographic transducers. (The eye movement is sampled at 1 kHz, the other parameters at 250 Hz. The sensor sends approximately 5.2 kB of data per second.)