Funded by the Research Council of Finland for four years. We are laying the foundations through three closely connected activities: understanding cognitive state through interaction, building an emergency operations simulation, and learning from emergency professionals.
The CATCH project has officially started. Funded by the Research Council of Finland for four years, the project investigates how AI can adapt its support to a person’s cognitive and functional state in time-critical and high-complexity situations. We are now laying the foundations for this work through three closely connected activities.
Understanding cognitive state through interaction
Our first step is to understand what ordinary interaction with digital systems can tell us about a person’s cognitive state. We are reviewing research on signals such as mouse movements, interaction timing, hesitation, and repeated information seeking, and how these may indicate changes in workload, attention, or fatigue.
This is an important foundation for CATCH. If cognitive state can be reliably inferred from normal interaction behaviour, adaptive AI could respond to changing human needs without relying solely on additional sensors or intrusive measurements.
Building an emergency operations simulation
At the same time, we are developing a multiplayer emergency operations game that creates controlled but realistic coordination situations under time pressure. Players take on different roles, such as dispatcher, field coordinator, and resource manager, and must work together as situations become increasingly complex and unexpected events occur.
The environment is designed as a research instrument: interactions and communication can be systematically captured and linked to moments of increasing workload and coordination difficulty. The first version is being developed together with students from our Holistic Digital Service Development course.
Learning from emergency professionals
Finally, we are starting interviews with professionals working in emergency operations. Simulations and existing research can only tell us part of the story. We want to understand where coordination becomes difficult in real operations, which situations create the greatest cognitive demands, and, importantly, when professionals would actually want AI to support them.
Together, these activities form the starting point for CATCH: understanding human state, recreating complex coordination situations, and grounding the development of adaptive AI in real operational needs.