The Konect value – a quantitative method for estimating perception time and accuracy for HMI designs

Abstract

ABSTRACTA human operator monitoring a safety-critical system has to perceive information quickly and accurately to detect critical system states and execute countermeasures in time. So far, testing such human machine interfaces (HMIs) is a complex task as HMI design prototypes have to be implemented for simulation environments to perform tests with professional operators. We propose Konect Value, a quantitative method to estimate the relative perception accuracy and operator reaction time at an early design stage. The model-based method solely requires a task model and HMI design sketches as input. To validate the Konect Value, we applied the quantitative measure to seven different HMIs in a truck platooning use case. A comparison of the calculated value to the measured accuracy and reaction times in a lab study (n=33) revealed high correlations for the relative reaction time (r=0.83, p<0.05) and relative perception accuracy (r=−0.90, p<0.01). This indicates that Konect Value is a promising method for early HMI design evaluation in the safety-critical system domain.