Mental Workload Evaluation of Port-Coordinators by Salivary NO₃^-

Abstract

The goal of our research is to quantitatively evaluate the mental workload of people in maritime society such as navigators, pilots, and port coordinators. Salivary NO₃^- is one of the physiological indices to quantitatively measure the mental workload and it is studied in our research. In the previous research, the experiment was conducted to measure salivary NO₃^- of port coordinators who perform radio communication in ports and harbors.^{1 Kitamura Kenichi, Quantitative Evaluation of Mental Workload for Port coordinator Using Salivary _NO3-, 2015) 2 Kitamura Kenichi, Evaluate mental workload of port coordinator based on salivary _NO3--Index, 2014)}. It is necessary to identify the events corresponding to the measurement values in the experiment so as to investigate the relationship between salivary NO₃^- and the duties corresponding to the response. Thus the duties list was constructed to classify and organize the events in the experiment, as the evet list^{3 Kamioka Daiki, Construction of port-coordinator duties list for mental workload assessment, 2017)}. In this study, the aim is to investigate the relationship between the response of salivary NO₃^- and the duties which are classified and organized in the duties list. In this research, the experiment of measuring salivary NO₃^- for port coordinators was conducted and the duties corresponding to the measurement values in the experiment were identified, the responses and the duties were analyzed. The trends were discovered by the experiment that salivary NO₃^- has a stronger response to vessel-related duties such as Communication and Watch than to duties which don’t concern vessels. Furthermore, the salivary NO₃^- of the veteran port coordinators responded to the duty of Watch, while the salivary NO₃^- of the newcomer port coordinators responded to the duty of Communication, more so than other duties.