Reliability in Extreme Isolation: A Natural Language Processing Tool for Stress Self-assessment

Life in isolation is a condition that affects more people every day. From isolation of people in case of an epidemic (Ebola, Coronavirus, ..) to mineworkers or scientist in the Antarctic environment, it is currently well established that extreme isolation is a stressor element which negatively affects human creating stress and social conflict. Living in outer space is one of the most extreme forms of isolation that can be used as a test bench for isolation research. Crews in space are expected to be able to manage independently stress and social conflict problems to be highly reliable and autonomous. Human natural language (NL) has the potential of being a valuable source of information on crew-members stress and reliability in isolation. Based on the use of NL, the PSI (Performance and Stress in Isolation) research group is developing an Artificial Intelligent tool for the autonomous monitoring of stress and reliability. In order to develop this tool, the first step (here presented) is to investigate the correlation of NL with stress and reliability within the PSI experiment. The experiment consisted of three tasks to be performed periodically during the isolation: 1. Analysis of free written communication (NL); 2. Short self-reference questionnaire; and 3. Detection of heart rate and blood pressure values. In this paper we present the preliminary data collected from 29 participants (17 males and 12 females) to 6 space analogue missions accomplished in Europe, the USA and Israel in the 2016 – 2019 time frames. That is, so far, the largest database ever analyzed of this kind. The results are coherent with what is described in the literature about NLP content and style analysis, with the novelty of the correlations found with the cardiovascular parameters, thus reinforcing the perspective of applying a NLP AI system for supporting stress management in extreme isolation contexts from Space to Earth spin off.