Leveraging eye-tracking technologies to promote aviation safety : a review of key aspects, challenges, and future perspectives

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to explore the key aspects, challenges, and future perspectives on eye-tracking studies aiming at promoting human-performance-related aviation safety. We reviewed 72 relevant articles to summarise the insights regarding three research questions: 1) what roles in aviation were studied concerning aviation safety? 2) how are the eye-tracking features utilised to address the dirty dozen issues? 3) what challenges remain in exploiting eye tracking to promote aviation safety? According to the reviewed articles, eye movements have been used to monitor the operators' mental states in real-time and provide references for operators’ awareness enhancement measures in aviation. However, more comprehensive exploitation of eye-tracking technologies covering more non-pilot roles in aviation is still unexploited. Besides, real-time applications based on eye-tracking technologies are still rare due to the considerable preprocessing time of raw data. Therefore, this work advocates for the exploitation of eye-tracking technologies to investigate the behaviours of various roles in aviation. It also calls for the enhancement of the data processing model to develop more real-time applications based on eye-tracking in future studies. Practical applications: It is hoped this work could provide a basis for human-performance-related aviation safety research and attract more open discussions in the explorations and implementation of utilising eye-tracking technologies to promote aviation safety.