Present and Future of Biomedical Monitoring in Military Aviation (with special regard to the heart rate variabiliy and cerebral blood perfusion variance caused by stress)

Abstract

The dynamic and unbroken development of military aviation after closing the Cold War era, even in the age of asymmetric warfare render the human factor to the most vulnerable link of the chain in flight safety. Highly agile manoeuvrable aircrafts showing broad range of altitude and acceleration parameters, requiring the sustained support for human working capability and physiological tolerance in extreme environmental settings. Nevertheless, it can provoke unforseenable risks and challenges even for the pilots of latest generation of combat aircrafts. resulting in augmented stress and occasionally limited sensorial perception, false situational orientation and erroneous physical response activity which can repeatedly lead to stress, even to momentary incapacitation with psychological background. The evaluation of fatigue (rate of exhaustion process) and assessment of efficient regeneration is also essential from the aspect of longterm working ability maintenance and prevention of „burnout” syndrome. Analyzing the physical and mental burden provoked by military missions we are going to characterize the physiological stress responses in ground based VR (virtual reality) simulation environment in order to forecast them in real deployment settings. We are going to focus on registration of the altered perfusion of brain by means of NIRS (near-infrared spectroscopy) cerebral pulsoxymetry by INVOS and heart rate variance measurements by Firstbeat Bodyguard, considering their possible adaptation to real flight missions.