Ricerc@Sapienza

Nowadays, the attention toward the working environment grows sensibly: one person out of ten in Europe is suffering from one or more work-related health problems and each year there are more than 3.000 fatal work-related accidents in Europe. One of the major causes of such accidents is the human error, strongly correlated with the worker's tiredness, stress, and mental workload. The neurophysiological assessment of these human factors is well validated and known in scientific literature but there are still several open issues regarding its spread in a working context. For example, one of the main issue corresponds to the invasiveness associated to the workers' evaluation which could negatively interfere with the worker's activities and therefore it could imply a very low acceptance toward such a kind of evaluation. The present project aims at developing a zero-invasiveness tool to respond to the need for non-contact evaluation of workers.
On one side, a contactless approach for the workers¿ evaluation plays a critical role in specific fields, i.e. the road hauliers, because it could not negatively interfere with the worker¿s tasks. Furthermore, a contactless approach would also not affect the worker's performance. On the other side, a contactless approach would allow the workers evaluation while also respecting the social distancing practices formally provided by the World Health Organization to face the pandemic COVID-19 emergency.
The REmote tool for Mental State evaluation (REMES) project would face a double-open issue in the industrial and scientific communities: (1) improve the wellbeing and safety of the workers in their working place through a neurophysiological evaluation while respecting their privacy; (2) validate a contactless methodology to estimate mental workload, stress, tiredness and emotional state, evaluating different autonomic parameters such as the Heart Rate (HR), the Eye Blinks Rate (EBR) and the Respiration Rate (RR).