Mitigation of Biodynamic Feedthrough for Touchscreens on the Flight Deck

Biodynamic feedthrough (BDFT) is a key issue for touchscreen operations on the future flight deck, as cockpit accelerations due to turbulence leave pilots vulnerable to erroneous touches that disrupt task performance. This research focuses on the implementation of a software-based cancellation approach to mitigate the adverse effects of BDFT in touchscreen dragging tasks. A flight-simulator experiment with 18 participants was performed to estimate models of BDFT dynamics for horizontal and vertical touch-inputs on a primary flight display. The averaged BDFT models were used to cancel BDFT in the same continuous dragging task used for model identification and a discrete point-to-point dragging task. While for the continuous task the cancellation enabled 63% mitigation in BDFT, the same cancellation was ineffective for the discrete task, due to reduced BDFT susceptibility. Overall, the results show that while model-based BDFT cancellation can be highly effective, a key technical challenge will be ensuring it is sufficiently task-adaptive.