Human Workload Prediction: Lag Horizon Selection

Abstract

Human-robot teams must be aware of human workload when operating in uncertain, dynamic environments. Prior work employed physiological response metrics from wearable sensors to estimate the current human workload; however, these estimates only enable robots to respond to under- or overload conditions reactively. Current human workload prediction approaches are limited to short prediction horizons and fail to investigate variable lag horizons' impact on predictions. This letter investigates the impact of lag horizons on both univariate and multivariate time series forecasting models for human workload prediction. A key finding is that univariate predictions required longer lag horizons of 240 seconds (s), whereas multivariate workload predictions sufficed with shorter lag horizons with diminishing returns around 120s.