Adults are constantly exposed to stressful conditions at their workplace, and this can lead to decreased job performance followed by detrimental clinical health problems. Advancement of sensor technologies has allowed the electroencephalography (EEG) devices to be portable and used in real-time to monitor mental health. However, real-time monitoring is not often practical in workplace environments with complex operations such as kindergarten, firefighting and offshore facilities. Integrating the EEG with virtual reality (VR) that emulates workplace conditions can be a tool to assess and monitor mental health of adults within their working environment. This paper evaluates the mental states induced when performing a stressful task in a VR-based offshore environment. The theta, alpha and beta frequency bands are analysed to assess changes in mental states due to physical discomfort, stress and concentration. During the VR trials, mental states of discomfort and disorientation are observed with the drop of theta activity, whilst the stress induced from the conditional tasks is reflected in the changes of low-alpha and high-beta activities. The deflection of frontal alpha asymmetry from negative to positive direction reflects the learning effects from emotion-focus to problem-solving strategies adopted to accomplish the VR task. This study highlights the need for an integrated VR-EEG system in workplace settings as a tool to monitor and assess mental health of working adults.
Wind-waves exhibit variations both in shape and steepness, and their asymmetrical nature is a well-known feature. One of the important characteristics of the sea surface is the front-back asymmetry of wind-wave crests. The wind-wave conditions on the surface of the sea constitute a sea state, which is listed as an essential climate variable by the Global Climate Observing System and is considered a critical factor for structural safety and optimal operations of offshore oil and gas platforms. Methods such as statistical representations of sensor-based wave parameters observations and numerical modeling are used to classify sea states. However, for offshore structures such as oil and gas platforms, these methods induce high capital expenditures (CAPEX) and operating expenses (OPEX), along with extensive computational power and time requirements. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a novel, low-cost deep learning-based sea state classification model using visual-range sea images. Firstly, a novel visual-range sea state image dataset was designed and developed for this purpose. The dataset consists of 100,800 images covering four sea states. The dataset was then benchmarked on state-of-the-art deep learning image classification models. The highest classification accuracy of 81.8% was yielded by NASNet-Mobile. Secondly, a novel sea state classification model was proposed. The model took design inspiration from GoogLeNet, which was identified as the optimal reference model for sea state classification. Systematic changes in GoogLeNet’s inception block were proposed, which resulted in an 8.5% overall classification accuracy improvement in comparison with NASNet-Mobile and a 7% improvement from the reference model (i.e., GoogLeNet). Additionally, the proposed model took 26% less training time, and its per-image classification time remains competitive.
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