ABSTRACT
This paper describes an easily deployable networked platform for collecting Electroencephalography (EEG) and Electrocardiography (ECG) from the members of a team and for analyzing and reporting the team’s cognitive state in real-time.
Organizations are increasingly dependent on co-located, virtual and distributed teams. Current measures of team performance depend on qualitative reporting and expert observations making it difficult to objectively equate performances across teams, training sites, or over time. Our hypothesis is that the team dynamics can be unobtrusively measured using EEG to objectively quantify the team’s cognitive state. In developing this neurodynamic framework and hardware platform, we combined real-time EEG derived measures of engagement and workload from individuals into unitary metrics of team dynamics. The resulting metrics can be collected and analyzed in real-world situations, are sensitive to long and short-term task changes, and can be analyzed and reported in near real-time. The system has been implemented with tasks of varying difficulty including simple neurocognitive tasks, problem-solving decision making tasks, and complex submarine piloting and navigation tasks.
