Psychological health monitoring for pilots and astronauts by tracking sleep-stress-emotion changes

The effects of stress on human behavior and performance have been well recognized. However, little has been investigated on the impact of psychological stress on pilots and astronauts. Living a life of constantly altered sleeping hours, pilots or astronauts are experiencing sleep stage fragments or long working hours with little or no sleep. The relationship between sleep and stress is reciprocal. Studies have shown that even in low-stress conditions, sleep-deprived participants demonstrate anger and anxiety a lot more frequently than participants with normal sleep quality and hours. In this paper, we introduce a new psychological health-monitoring framework. The prognostics sensors include Actiwatch for sleep monitoring, BioPatch from Zephyr to collect electrocardiogram (ECG) for heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV) for emotion changing monitoring. In this paper, a new Sleep-HRV-Emotion analytical model is proposed to assess the risk of emotion changes in real time. Prognostics analysis and prediction of psychological health is performed based on the proposed new model. Based on the output of the prognostics analysis, several stress intervention strategies are suggested both for the general public as well as for pilots and astronauts in particular. These interventions include the time to rest/sleep, hours of sleep, ultrasound pulses, and Yoga breathing. As such, these intervention strategies help recover, preserve, or improve pilot and astronaut performance, especially during long-duration space flights, and, ultimately, human settlement on other planetary bodies.