Cognitive-emotional Stress and Risk Stratification of Situational Awareness in Immersive First Responder Training

First responders engage in highly stressful situations at the emergency site. Maintaining cognitive control under these circumstances is a necessary condition to perform efficient decision making for the purpose of own health and to pursue mission objectives. We are aiming at developing biosensor-based decision support for risk stratification on cognitive readiness of first responders at the mission site. In a first development stage, an exploratory pilot study was performed to test a formalized reporting schema applying equivalent stress in real, non-immersive and fully immersive training environments. Wearable psychophysiological measurement technology was applied to estimate the cognitive-emotional stress level under both training conditions. In this work we particularly focus on the potential of predicting the risk level for failures in situation awareness from digital analysis of cognitive-emotional stress. The results provide statistically significant indications for risk stratification of cognitive readiness based on situation awareness theory.