Project description
Sensing pilot fatigue and drowsiness enhances air travel safety
Car manufacturers have already made several systems available to enhance safety, from belt reminders to speed limit settings. A new safety system which has been legislated into the European automotive industry are driver monitoring systems for the detection of drowsiness and distraction. The aerospace sector may soon be getting on board thanks to the smart sensor technology being developed by the EU-funded HIPNOSIS project to monitor pilots’ drowsiness and fatigue. The platform includes two sensing systems, one vision-based to monitor behavioral signs of drowsiness and one worn on the wrist to sense biosignals. Placed in the cockpit, it will help ensure pilots are fully alert and engaged from take-off to landing.
Objective
With ever increasing air traffic and the fierce competition between airlines, cost reduction is exerting more and more pressure on airlines, inevitably transferred to pilots whose profession becomes increasingly demanding. The adoption of new ground technologies has the potential to increase safety while decreasing operating costs. Platform 3 of LPA IADP aims to develop disruptive flight-qualified cockpit operations concepts by a major design re-thinking towards a “human-centric” approach to operate aircrafts. The ultimate goal is to reduce crew workload, improve fatigue-related safety, situational awareness and support disruptive cockpit operations.
HIPNOSIS will contribute to develop the next generation cockpit by providing a hardware and software implementation of smart sensors to monitor cognitive states such as drowsiness and fatigue, which will allow a great leap in flight safety. HIPNOSIS approach is to implement two sensing systems: (1) a vision-based system integrated in the cockpit dashboard to continuously monitor the pilots in the cockpit and detect suspicious behavior linked to drowsiness and (2) a smart wristband which will sense several bio signals through advanced optical sensing technologies, before, during and after the flight. The system will be interfaced to a “pilot state monitoring system” resulting from a previous development in Platform 3 of the IADP. The system design shall be compliant with aircraft cockpit installation, the operational environment and pre-certification requirements to reach TRL6, which will be verified after successful deployment in a Falcon 7X cockpit.
The HIPNOSIS consortium brings together partners able to cover the whole value chain of innovative product development: SERMA Engineering (F), an OEM for aeronautical equipment, CSEM (CH), an RTO experienced in innovative technologies and INNOV+ (F) a startup company developing and selling standalone systems for cognitive states monitoring for the automotive industry.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
CS2-IA - Innovation actionCoordinator
2000 Neuchatel
Switzerland