Unusual Statistics of Heart Period Add to Its Capability as an Index of Pilot Workload

Efficacy of heart period was investigated as part of a study of effective methods of pilot workload assessment. Pilots flew missions in the NASA Ames Boeing 727, Phase II certified simulator while workload measures were taken during missions under normal or emergency conditions. In addition to the heart mean and standard deviation, other descriptive statistical procedures were performed, including skewedness, kurtosis, and spectral analyses, which proved relevant to the discriminating power of the heart period as a measure of pilot workload.