A glimpse ahead: Forecasting 5.5-s human vigilance for enhanced safety in Industry 5.0

In the context of Industry 5.0 and human-robot interaction, ensuring the safety of operators by avoiding human errors is crucial. Monitoring vigilance decrement is an essential aspect of this effort, aimed at mitigating safety risks and enhancing productivity. A potentially promising solution to this challenge is using a passive brain-computer interface (BCI) based on electroencephalography (EEG) recordings. However, its application in industrial settings has yet to be explored in-depth. This study uses EEG data to introduce a novel experimental protocol and analysis pipeline to predict vigilance degradation in an industrial research laboratory. The dataset was gathered from ten healthy volunteers who observed a robotic arm for 23 min. The EEG power spectrum over time was computed using the continuous wavelet transform (CWT). After confirming growth in power for the α band using a linear regression model, we forecast its trend using four models. As a conventional approach, we used the vector autoregressive (VAR) model, serving as a reference for comparison with three deep learning architectures: a temporal convolutional network (TCN), a gated recurrent unit (GRU) and an encoder-decoder (ED)-GRU. The proposed ED-GRU model outperformed the others showing accurate forecasts (mean absolute error = 0.048, R² = 0.726) up to 5.5 s. The findings suggest that monitoring vigilance degradation in Industry 5.0 is a feasible strategy to prevent human accidents and reduced performance during repetitive tasks.