A proposal of a classification model for the cognitive workload of human activity in a context-aware system

The skill level of a person in processing information, reacting to his/her surroundings and decision making for performing an activity is determined by the allocation of the mental resources demanded by such activity. When the allocation is inappropriate, there is a higher possibility for some accident to occur. Thus, one can notice that the cognitive workload spent by the person is an important variable that can take him to a risky situation. Since it is not possible to measure the cognitive workload spent by a person during the performance of an activity directly, we noticed the need to evaluate the level of his/her performance in order to be possible to infer the cognitive workload used. So, we propose the creation of a model to classify the cognitive workload based on the behavioral model skill-rule-knowledge and the relations of performance properties with the context surrounding the person. The evaluation of the model was made using a public dataset and the results showed a promising approach for the classification of human performances. Keywords: human activity, context-aware middleware, ubiquity, cognitive workload, human performance.