The POLIMonitor project, presented by a team from the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering of the Politecnico di Milano composed of Prof. Mara Tanelli, Prof. Valentina Breschi and the PhD students Jessica Leoni and Eugenia Villa, has been selected among the winners of the first challenges promoted by Leonardo within Solvers Wanted, the new innovation scouting platform.
Leonardo set the challenges, starting with “Technology and Innovation Needs”, tied to the map of requirements the company has singled out, including the development of a solution able to monitor an aircraft pilot’s psychophysical condition, and the identification of sophisticated techniques in the fields of quantum imaging and quantum computing.
The project presented by the Department’s team was awarded a contract of collaboration with Leonardo to implement the proposed solutions, and the research them will have the chance to join the Leonardo Team for Innovation network, adding the network brand to its logo.
The development of aircraft systems and their related functionalities is subject to continuous evolution. The tasks allocated to pilots are increasing in number and complexity, so the topic of mental workload has been receiving increasing attention from the entire aeronautical community, both in civil and military fields. In the future, the development of automatic decision-making strategies will support pilots in the management of aircraft, helping them to process an ever-increasing number of information in real time and make mission-critical decisions. It is therefore important to constantly monitor the level of stress in which a pilot operates in order to be able to act on the instrumentation and configure it dynamically to facilitate interactions with it. POLIMonitor proposed a Pilot Performance Monitoring solution capable of monitoring the psycho-physical health of the pilot and representing it in real time by means of a single, immediately readable parameter. The solution will consist of a hardware/software system based on a mix of biometric, environmental and vision measures, based on which data analysis and artificial intelligence algorithms will be designed, capable of optimally merging the information given by the sensors to conceive an indicator of the pilot’s psycho-physical health that can be computed in real time.