Methodological issues of real time data acquisition from multiple sources of physiological data

Safe and effective use of monitoring, scheduling, and action-guidance technologies is often dependent upon human operator agency. The cognitive ability of the human operator to control the environment varies depending on the individual's affective and physiological state as well as on situation-dependent temporal and contextual factors. Clearly, there is a need for real-time assessment of cognitive load in order to increase operator effectiveness through adaptive filtering of information. In order to begin assessment of how to flexibly augment human operator capabilities in real time, a study to determine the best practices for intercepting and synchronizing biosensor information from operators engaged in visual search tasks was performed.