Human-centered System Design Research Articles

Information Model for Hybrid Prototyping in Design Reviews of Assembly Stations

Human-centered system design is one way of ensuring required flexibility in assembly through cognitive and motor capabilities of humans. Human factors and ergonomics must be considered at an early stage in system development to improve productivity, quality and to secure well-being of workers. The paper presents a model-based approach for design reviews to ensure the ergonomics of assembly systems at an early stage enabled by different models of mixed reality. An information model is proposed to enable standardized review reports for the combined use of physical, digital and virtual models. System designers are supported by actionable knowledge gathered in MR enabled design reviews. Thus, efforts limiting the economic applicability of Hybrid Prototyping can be significantly reduced.

Towards a Holistic Framework for Digital Twins of Human-Machine Systems

This article goes back to the origin of Digital Twin (DT) concepts, contextualizes their emergence and highlights their main key points. Models of DT are discussed with regard to nine criteria: physical asset, model, communication, service, data, product, autonomy, environment, and human. Criteria like autonomy, environment and human are rarely studied in terms of shared control between humans and machines or in terms of user surroundings integration while Human-Centered System Design approaches exist. Few of models studied consider humans as a physical part of DT. Similarly to a Machine Digital Twin, it is proposed to realized a Human Digital Twin for modelling the human part of Human-Machine Systems (HMS). Therefore, design guidelines, solutions and a new framework are proposed to set the pace for a new generation of Digital Twins.

Interactive and revisable decision-support: doing more harm than good?

ABSTRACT While human-centered system design has actively sought to reduce cognitive biases in decision-making, a gap exists on the distinct role of media features in decision-support systems (DSS). Intuitively, we may presume that DSS interactivity and revisability remedy such biases. Yet, experiments reported herein reveal that combining the two features may conversely aggravate such bias. These features have been studied as distinct factors moderating bias in decision-criteria rating tasks in two experiments (sample sizes: n1 =96 for first; for second with criteria vividness controlled, n2=429). Such study emanates from a novel view of DSS as persuasive communication media. Thus, a unique adaptation of Media Synchronicity Theory to a computer–human communication context ensues. This promotes the isolated study of interactivity and revisability, alongside their interaction. Hence, the study finds statistically significant bias reductions for revisability treatments without interactive feedback. Such real-time automatic feedback, surprisingly, makes no impact in the majority of cases. Vividness controlled, it is still revisability-only cases indicating any reduction in possible order effects bias (despite extra effort required). Thus, a fresh case is made to evaluate interactivity and revisability separately in DSS media, with empirical evidence that – together – they could be ‘doing more harm than good’.

Holons on the Horizon: Re-Understanding Automation and Control

In Re-Understanding Automation and Control in the era of digital automation of societal systems, we need to understand the inter-connected relations between knowledge, culture, technology and society. This in turn demands the exploration of social and cultural architectures, which facilitate them. Whilst computational model of data systems is built upon the bottom-up architecture, it is the top-down architecture of social and cultural contexts that synchronises the processing and outcomes of data systems, may they relate to organisational systems, heath and welfare systems, or institutional systems. It is this notion of the inter-dependence of the bottom-up and top-down architectures that makes us act beyond the linear gaze worldview of automation and control of production systems, and explore the multiplicity of interconnections between and across societal systems. In these horizons, we see the inter-connectedness between the unit and the whole, between the horizontal and vertical, and a symbiosis of hand and brain- an augmentation of the human and the machine. The ideas of inter-connectedness, augmentation and symbiosis lie at the core of holonic horizons. These horizons allow us to transcend the limit of the calculation and control model of automation, and enable the design of human-centred systems that valorise differences whilst utilising the richness and diversity of human-machine collaborations. When we envision these interactions and collaborations as a systems developmental process, we begin to visualise systems design from an interdependent perspective, which goes beyond the linear gaze of “utility”. The paper explores the ways holonic architectures engage us in the design process.

Supporting Emergency Medical Care Teams with an Integrated Status Display Providing Real-Time Access to Medical Best Practices, Workflow Tracking, and Patient Data.

The work of a hospital's medical staff is safety critical and often occurs under severe time constraints. To provide timely and effective cognitive support to medical teams working in such contexts, guidelines in the form of best practice workflows for healthcare have been developed by medical organizations. However, the high cognitive load imposed in such stressful and rapidly changing environments poses significant challenges to the medical staff or team in adhering to these workflows. In collaboration with physicians and nurses from Carle Foundation Hospital, we first studied and modeled medical team's individual responsibilities and interactions in cardiac arrest resuscitation and decomposed their overall task into a set of distinct cognitive tasks that must be specifically supported to achieve successful human-centered system design. We then developed a medical Best Practice Guidance (BPG) system for reducing medical teams' cognitive load, thus fostering real-time adherence to best practices. We evaluated the resulting system with physicians and nurses using a professional patient simulator used for medical training and certification. The evaluation results point to a reduction of cognitive load and enhanced adherence to medical best practices.

Design of a Gait Phase Recognition System That Can Cope With EMG Electrode Location Variation

Electromyogram (EMG) signal-based gait phase recognition for walking-assist devices warrants much attention in human-centered system design as it well exemplifies human-in-the-loop control where the system's prediction directly affects subsequent walking motion. Since walking motion poses considerable variations in electrode placement, performance reliability of such systems is contingent on a combination of electrode montage and a feature extraction method that takes into account underlying physiological factors of peripheral muscles where electrodes are placed. In many practical applications, however, proper consideration of effects of the electrode location variation on performance reliability of the system has received scant empirical attention. Here, based on a user-centered design principle, we establish a gait phase recognition system that is capable of rigidly controlling ill effects due to this covariate by carrying out a large-scale analysis that combines statistical, model-based, and empirical approaches. In doing so, we have developed a special sensing suit for the control of electrode placement and a reliable data acquisition. We then have conducted a nonparametric statistical analysis on class separability values of thirty types of EMG feature sets, followed by a model-based analysis to address the tradeoff between class separability and dimensionality. To further address the issue of how these results generalize to independent systems and data sets, we have carried out an empirical performance assessment over six classification methods. First, the two feature types, Integral of Absolute Value and Histogram, and a combination of the two are shown to be robust against electrode location variations while providing a firm performance guarantee. Second, system organization scenarios are presented on a case-by-case basis, allowing us to trade off system complexity for on-line adaptation capability. Collectively, our integrated analysis lends itself to formulating a guideline for design of highly reliable EMG signal-based walking assistant systems in a variety of smart home scenarios.

Conformal displays: human factor analysis of innovative landing aids

In the past couple of years, research on display content for helicopter operations headed in a new direction. The already reached goals could evolve into a paradigm change for information visualization. Technology advancements allow implementing three-dimensional and conformal content on a helmet-mounted see-through device. This superimposed imagery inherits the same optical flow as the environment. It is supposed to ease switching between display information and environmental cues. The concept is neither pathbreaking nor new, but it has not been successfully established in aviation yet. Nevertheless, there are certainly some advantages to expect—at least from perspective of a human-centered system design. Within the following pages, the next generation displays will be presented and discussed with a focus on human factors. Beginning with recalling some human factor related research facts, an experiment comparing the former two-dimensional research displays will be presented. Before introducing the DLR conformal symbol set and the three experiments about an innovative drift, indication related research activities toward conformal symbol sets will be addressed.

Predictive Communication Quality Control in Haptic Teleoperation With Time Delay and Packet Loss

Teleoperation in extreme environments may suffer from communication delay and packet loss during the transmission of command signals and sensory feedback. This study investigates whether online control of communication time delay by using quality of service (QoS) techniques can improve operator task performance in a virtual teleoperated collision avoidance task. We first introduce the framework of predictive communication quality control based on a dynamic performance model of a human handling the teleoperation system. We then apply the framework to a virtual collision avoidance scenario and evaluate it with two behavioral studies. Study 1 identifies that prolonging time delay significantly increases the frequency of collisions and completion time. We develop a model for predicting the probability of the operator causing collisions with the wall and fit its parameters with the experimental data. In Study 2, we compare the completion time and the number of collisions with and without the predictive QoS control. It is shown that the predictive QoS control is capable of reducing the number of collisions, but it does not affect task completion time. The prediction model and empirical validation provide a successful proof of concept for a human-centered system design, in which the dynamic model of the operator is the center of the control architecture.

Edge-centric Computing

In many aspects of human activity, there has been a continuous struggle between the forces of centralization and decentralization. Computing exhibits the same phenomenon; we have gone from mainframes to PCs and local networks in the past, and over the last decade we have seen a centralization and consolidation of services and applications in data centers and clouds. We position that a new shift is necessary. Technological advances such as powerful dedicated connection boxes deployed in most homes, high capacity mobile end-user devices and powerful wireless networks, along with growing user concerns about trust, privacy, and autonomy requires taking the control of computing applications, data, and services away from some central nodes (the "core") to the other logical extreme (the "edge") of the Internet. We also position that this development can help blurring the boundary between man and machine, and embrace social computing in which humans are part of the computation and decision making loop, resulting in a human-centered system design. We refer to this vision of human-centered edge-device based computing as Edge-centric Computing . We elaborate in this position paper on this vision and present the research challenges associated with its implementation.

SOME MORE EVIDENCE FOR JUSTIFYING HUMAN-CENTRED SYSTEMS

This paper makes a contribution towards justifying the development of human-centred systems by reviving the debate about how to persuade stakeholders and other decisionmakers to vote in favor of these systems development approaches. It starts by a general discussion on how cost-effective the development of human-centred systems can be. Then the relevant part of the comprehensive human-centred systems design framework by William B. Rouse is given as an example of methodology where the issues of justification are systematically covered. Finally, some results from case studies made in Europe are quoted, with the intention to contribute some more evidence supporting the fact that human-centred systems design is superior not only from the purely functional viewpoint, but also can be justified in factual bottom-line (i.e. economic) terms.

MIND MODEL AND SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE IN HUMAN-MACHINE COLLABORATIVE SYSTEMS

Even though social intelligence has not been clearly defined yet, consideration of this new type of intelligence should be important for realizing a new generation of human-machine collaborative systems based on human-centered system design policy. In this article, social intelligence and mind model for implementing socially intelligent agents are studied. At first, emotional and affective aspect of social intelligence is mainly discussed because the aspect is considered as more important in contrast with goal-oriented intelligence. Then, implementation of the mind model and its application as an experiment system is discussed with considering the experiment results.

Hfe's Place in the Parade: Should We Be Drum Majors or Toot Our Own Horns?

A debate among the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society's membership concerns the best method for increasing the disciplines prominence and influence in the design of human-centered systems. At last year's Annual Meeting in Minneapolis, President William Howell gave a perspective on the two schools of thought—(1) the Unique Discipline model and (2) the Shared Philosophy model. In this panel discussion, several members of the management community that lead groups practicing HFE were asked to share their experiences on their successes and barriers in moving HFE to positions of influence in product design.

Design of human-centered systems: A technological bridge to the 21st century

Design of human-centered systems: A technological bridge to the 21st century

Scandinavian human-centred systems design: Theoretical reflections and challenges

Currently there is a clear trend towards questioning the traditional sovereign human self which for two hundred years has had an undisputed central status within European culture and philosophy. This challenges the tradition of anthropocentrism which in a Scandinavian computer science context has had two theoretical foundations: the workoriented design theory represented by the Scandinavian participatory design philosophy, and the idea of the computer to a rather passive medium for human communication. The process, reducing the computer to a rather passive medium for human communication. The paper firstly examines these two theoretical anthropocentric positions. Secondly it outlines the trend towards challenging the status of the human self within different research contexts. This trend represents a challenge for Human-centred systems design. Finally, it discusses the new demands for conceptualising basic IT research phenomena created by this development, with particular focus on the issue of human-centredness as a systems design strategy.

Strategic options for CIM Technology-centred versus human-centred systems design

Despite that factories will soon be people-less, human aspects in system technology remain a key factor. Major problem areas however include reliability, design of jobs and interface design. Strategic options for research and development are put forward.