A Neurophysiological-Auditory “Listen Receipt” for Communication Enhancement

Information overload, and specifically auditory overload, is common in critical situations and detrimental to communication. Currently, there is no auditory equivalent of an email read receipt to know if a person has heard a message, other than waiting for a reply. This work hypothesizes that it may be possible to decode whether a person has indeed heard a message, or in other words, create an an auditory “listen receipt,” through use of non-invasive physiological or neural monitoring. We extracted a variety of features derived from Electrodermal activity (EDA), Electroencephalography (EEG), and the correlations between the acoustic envelope of the radio message and EEG to use in the decoder. We were able to classify the cases in which the subject responded correctly to the question in the message, versus the cases where they missed or heard the message incorrectly, with an accuracy of 79% and a receiver operating characteristic (ROC) area under the curve (AUC) of 0.83. This work suggests that the concept of a “listen receipt” may be possible, and future wearable machine-brain interface technologies may be able to automatically determine if an important radio message has been missed for both human-to-human and human-to-machine communication.