Cognitive and context-aware applications

Diminished vigilance caused by fatigue, stress, and excessive mental load have been cited as a major cause for most aviation accidents. The job of an Air Traffic Controller (ATC) includes helping pilots maintain safe distances between planes, avoid all obstacles, as well as safe landing and takeoff. Unfortunately, the ATC work environment along with extended hours and overtime consistently results in widespread fatigued Air Traffic Controllers. Similarly, distracted, and fatigued drivers are also the cause of an increasing number of traffic related accidents and deaths. Dynamic working conditions along with the user's physical and emotional state have significant impact upon the usability and security of the system. In order to address this problem we present a Cognitive and Context-Aware Framework (CCF) that determines user's affective state, cognitive load, and context information. This enables applications to make real-time decisions to improve usability, security, or simply enhance user experience. The CCF framework constantly captures and analyzes user's biometric data (e.g. pupillometric indices of cognitive load), environmental analysis, location and time. The CCF can be used to develop a variety of applications that want to make decisions based upon user's current affective states and context. The application's decisions can be as simple as alerting a supervisor in the event an ATC is found to be fatigued/sleepy or disable critical functionality. The CCF also has applications in the gaming industry, healthcare, and advertisement. In this paper, we present the overview of the framework along with a dynamically adaptable user interface as an example of CCF application.