Development of the Quantified Human

Abstract

A Sense-Assess-Augment (SAA) framework – originally outlined by Galster and Johnson (Sense-assess-augment: a taxonomy for human effectiveness. Technical report. United States Air Force Research Laboratory, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, 2013) and based loosely on the adaptive system framework of Feigh et al. (Hum Fact 54(6):1008–1024, 2012) – is presented for approaching augmentation of human performance. While the SAA framework has broad application across all three elements of human-computer interaction, including the machine, the human-machine interface, and the human operator, here we focus on its role for human performance augmentation. SAA begins with the human, sensing their physical, physiological, and psychological state. Sensing is the most mature piece of the SAA paradigm, because it leverages the considerable commercial investments in wearable sensors for athletics, healthcare, and human productivity. As a result, sensors exist or are in development that can measure a wide range of physiological parameters, such as brain activity, eye movement, skin temperature, and increasingly biological performance markers, such as blood glucose levels and molecules like orexin that indicate the onset of fatigue. Assessment involves aggregation of data from multiple sensors, algorithmic processing of the data, and correlation of the results to behaviors and actions of interest. The challenge is to empirically make sense of the data in relation to baselines that vary between and within individuals, and the needs of a task at hand that is shared by both human and machine and that may occur both in real time and across the human lifetime. Finally, based on the assessment, appropriate augmentation is delivered, which can take many forms, including redistribution of tasks from man to machine, changes in the operating environment, influences from external hardware, or even the growing use of “electroceuticals” – the use of electric stimulation to augment performance. The SAA framework provides a way of approaching human performance augmentation that is consistent with and leverages the emerging understanding of how humans can interact effectively with autonomous systems in an entirely new socio-technical dynamic.