A Basic study on Navigators’ Visual Observation Area and Stress Level for Ship Handling by Actual Ships and Simulators

A navigator gets navigational information for safe navigation from own ship and her environment through their five senses, and navigates her. We think that the most important thing is the ability to judge in various environments more than the knowledge of how to handle some instruments or equipments. What does the navigator do when he/she navigates? Recently, we use a ship handling simulator (simulator in short) to train the ship handling for safe navigation. We need to recognize the effect of training, the better usage of a simulator and the difference of stress level between actual ships and simulators. The purpose of this paper is to find characteristics of visual observation area and stress level of the navigator in the case of arriving and leaving port. In our experiments, we measured subject’s eye movement and heart rate variability which means the R-R interval. Our experimental ship is Training Ship FUKAE-MARU of Kobe University of Mercantile Marine (KUMM in short). The results show that characteristics of subject’s visual observation area and Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS in short) value calculated with R-R interval is how dependency of cue for both navigational environments.