Internship: fNIRS & Eye-Tracking – Validating New Fatigue Assessment Techniques

Internship: fNIRS & Eye-Tracking – Validating New Fatigue Assessment Techniques

The goal of this internship is to validate innovative methods for assessing pilot fatigue in simulated flight conditions. Accurate and early detection of fatigue is crucial for aviation safety, as it directly impacts pilot performance, decision making, and situational awareness. This internship will explore whether combining multiple physiological techniques leads to a more reliable and predictive assessment of fatigue.

Description
Your study will investigate the use of functional Near InfraRed Spectroscopy (fNIRS) in combination with eye tracking as tools for fatigue assessment. The main research question is whether these methods can strengthen each other to provide a more robust picture of fatigue compared to using them separately, and whether they can predict upcoming fatigue in advance. To this end, NLR colleagues will provide a low-fidelity computer simulation of an aircraft as the experimental task. This piloting task will be designed to induce varying states of arousal and fatigue in participants, under controlled conditions. As an intern, you will contribute to the experimental design, run the study with participants, and perform data analysis on the collected multimodal data. All work will be supported by an NLR supervisor, and depending on the internship type, the work can be extended into a master’s thesis.

Tasks to be foreseen:

• Contribute to the design of a fatigue-inducing piloting task in a flight simulation;
• Execute the experiment with participants;
• Collect and analyse fNIRS and eye-tracking data;
• Report and present findings on the two methods;
• Provide recommendations for follow-up studies and applications.

Duration

This fulltime internship can start October 1st (later is possible) and the duration will be 3 to 9 months (ideally five or more).

Requirements

• Master student in Cognitive Psychology, Human Factors, Biomedical Engineering, Neuroscience, or equivalent;
• Interest in the area of measuring the cognitive human;
• Good communication skills;
• Experience with physiological data collection (e.g. fNIRS, eye tracking) or experimental design is a plus, but not required.

What we offer

• A challenging graduation project/internship in a high-tech, aerospace-orientated work environment;
• Informal culture with room for personal initiative;
• Supervision from experts in the field;
• Internship results to be used in current and future projects;
• An internship allowance.

About NLR

Royal NLR has been the ambitious research organisation with the will to keep innovating for over 100 years. With that drive, we make the world of transportation safer, more sustainable, more efficient and more effective. We are on the threshold of breakthrough innovations. Plans and ideas start to move when these are fed with the right energy. Over 950 driven professionals work on research and innovation. From aircraft engineers to psychologists and from mathematicians to application experts.

You can contact:

• Maykel van Miltenburg, R&D Engineer, maykel.van.miltenburg@nlr.nl, 088-5113389
• Rolf Zon, Senior Scientist, rolf.zon@nlr.nl, 0885113190