One century after the first recording of human electroencephalographic (EEG) signals, EEG has become one of the most used neuroimaging techniques. The medical devices industry is now able to produce small and reliable EEG systems, enabling a wide variety of applications also with no-clinical aims, providing a powerful tool to neuroscientific research. However, these systems still suffer from a critical limitation, consisting in the use of wet electrodes, that are uncomfortable and require expertise to install and time from the user. In this context, dozens of different concepts of EEG dry electrodes have been recently developed, and there is the common opinion that they are reaching traditional wet electrodes quality standards. However, although many papers have tried to validate them in terms of signal quality and usability, a comprehensive comparison of different dry electrode types from multiple points of view is still missing. The present work proposes a comparison of three different dry electrode types, selected among the main solutions at present, against wet electrodes, taking into account several aspects, both in terms of signal quality and usability. In particular, the three types consisted in gold-coated single pin, multiple pins and solid-gel electrodes. The results confirmed the great standards achieved by dry electrode industry, since it was possible to obtain results comparable to wet electrodes in terms of signals spectra and mental states classification, but at the same time drastically reducing the time of montage and enhancing the comfort. In particular, multiple-pins and solid-gel electrodes overcome gold-coated single-pin-based ones in terms of comfort.

Air Traffic Management (ATM) will be more complex in the coming decades due to the growth and increased complexity of aviation and has to be improved in order to maintain aviation safety. It is agreed that without significant improvement in this domain, the safety objectives defined by international organisations cannot be achieved and a risk of more incidents/accidents is envisaged. Nowadays, computer science plays a major role in data management and decisions made in ATM. Nonetheless, despite this, Artificial Intelligence (AI), which is one of the most researched topics in computer science, has not quite reached end users in ATM domain. In this paper, we analyse the state of the art with regards to usefulness of AI within aviation/ATM domain. It includes research work of the last decade of AI in ATM, the extraction of relevant trends and features, and the extraction of representative dimensions. We analysed how the general and ATM eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) works, analysing where and why XAI is needed, how it is currently provided, and the limitations, then synthesise the findings into a conceptual framework, named the DPP (Descriptive, Predictive, Prescriptive) model, and provide an example of its application in a scenario in 2030. It concludes that AI systems within ATM need further research for their acceptance by end-users. The development of appropriate XAI methods including the validation by appropriate authorities and end-users are key issues that needs to be addressed.

Several models defining different types of cognitive human behaviour are available. For this work, we have selected the Skill, Rule and Knowledge (SRK) model proposed by Rasmussen in 1983. This model is currently broadly used in safety critical domains, such as the aviation. Nowadays, there are no tools able to assess at which level of cognitive control the operator is dealing with the considered task, that is if he/she is performing the task as an automated routine (skill level), as procedures-based activity (rule level), or as a problem-solving process (knowledge level). Several studies tried to model the SRK behaviours from a Human Factor perspective. Despite such studies, there are no evidences in which such behaviours have been evaluated from a neurophysiological point of view, for example, by considering brain activity variations across the different SRK levels. Therefore, the proposed study aimed to investigate the use of neurophysiological signals to assess the cognitive control behaviours accordingly to the SRK taxonomy. The results of the study, performed on 37 professional Air Traffic Controllers, demonstrated that specific brain features could characterize and discriminate the different SRK levels, therefore enabling an objective assessment of the degree of cognitive control behaviours in realistic settings.

Driving fatigue has been identified as one of the main factors affecting drivers’ safety. The aim of this study was to analyze drivers’ different mental states, such as alertness and drowsiness, and find out a neurometric indicator able to detect drivers’ fatigue level in terms of brain networks. Twelve young, healthy subjects were recruited to take part in a driver fatigue experiment under different simulated driving conditions. The Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals of the subjects were recorded during the whole experiment and analyzed by using Granger-Causality-based brain effective networks. It was that the topology of the brain networks and the brain’s ability to integrate information changed when subjects shifted from the alert to the drowsy stage. In particular, there was a significant difference in terms of strength of Granger causality (GC) in the frequency domain and the properties of the brain effective network i.e., causal flow, global efficiency and characteristic path length between such conditions. Also, some changes were more significant over the frontal brain lobes for the alpha frequency band. These findings might be used to detect drivers’ fatigue levels, and as reference work for future studies.