Toward Continuous Measurement of Team Performance Through Heart Rate Coupling

Team coordination failures remain a persistent safety concern in domains where performance depends on coordinated action. This work examines whether physiological coupling among team members can provide a passive indicator of team success during a cooperative task. Twenty triads completed a virtual reality button-pressing task in which task and communication demands were systematically varied across four experimental conditions. Three recurrence-based indices from synchronized heart rate data were entered into mixed-effects regression models alongside experimental condition covariates. Results showed that these coupling indices accounted for variance in sensitivity and omission errors after removing condition-driven effects, with longer recurrent patterns associated with better outcomes and more variable coupling patterns linked to degraded performance. Perceived workload was driven by experimental conditions rather than physiological coordination. These results support the feasibility of deriving actionable team-state indicators from wearable cardiac sensors, advancing efforts toward unobtrusive assessment of collective coordination in applied settings.