Potential NASA Commercial Applications: ATHENA is a software-based completely unobtrusive cognitive load sensor. It will provide astronauts, mission planners, and system designers with a rapid, automatic, and systematic way to assess the demands of tasks, allowing them to schedule modifications or adapt interfaces in order to optimize the use of the crew's cognitive resources and reduce the risks associated with prolonged over-work or under-work conditions that can threaten mission success and crew performance and behavioral health. This directly addresses the HRP's identified risk of "Performance Errors Due to Fatigue Resulting from Sleep Loss, Circadian Desynchronization, Extended Wakefulness, and Work Overload". ATHENA will produce empirical evidence and the underlying technologies to help close the knowledge gaps "Sleep1: ...identify a set of validated and minimally obtrusive tools to monitor and measure sleep-wake activity and associated performance changes for spaceflight", and "Sleep2: We need to understand the contribution of [...] work overload, on individual and team behavioral health and performance, including operational performance, for spaceflight." The successful deployment of the ATHENA sensor can be used with NASA's current mission planning tool, playbook, for missions onboard ISS or future long duration missions. ATHENA can also be used by NASA's Flight Analogs Project team, where its evidence based workload measures can be used to facilitate the manipulation of experimental conditions.
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