Human Factors Professionals Research Articles

Practicing Relevant Skills in the Classroom

A particular challenge to professors of human factors/ergonomics courses in academia is to make their syllabi and course contents relevant to the demands placed on graduates from human factors programs as they enter the labor market. Recent surveys suggest that academic curricula indeed fall short of expectations in several critical areas. To respond to these challenges and the demonstrated deficiencies, a panel of human factors professionals from various areas in the industry suggested ways to incorporate relevant skills exercises in academic curricula. This panel is part of an ongoing dialog between employers of human factors/ergonomics professionals in the industry and the professors of human factors students in academia.

New control room technologies: human factors analytical tools for railway safety

Inadequate consideration of human factors has been found to be a leading cause of unwanted consequences associated with control room systems. To guard against these events, many safety regulators have mandated that human factors are to be addressed as part of safety management, with Australian railways receiving the national mandate in January 2013. At the moment, as is the case in many parts of the world, Australian railways do not have their own dedicated standard or guide on how to integrate human factors. Fortunately, understanding of human factors in work systems has advanced significantly since the 1980s and a growing professional body of specialists is emerging. Alongside systems engineers and project managers, many human factors specialists are involved in the design of new systems. By attending to the contextual details, designs become more compatible with their human counterparts and numerous analytical tools and techniques have been developed for this purpose. Therefore, it would be advantageous for railway operators and systems engineers to know the types of activities human factors specialists are involved in and how they might contribute to human factors integration. A literature review was conducted to identify the integration approaches used by technology designers and various safety-critical domains. Additionally, a study was conducted to identify the human factors analytical tools and techniques that are typically used in control room settings. Findings from the study provide a useful snapshot of the types of activities human factors professionals are involved in, the tools and techniques they use and the areas currently being addressed that benefit from closer human factors attention.

Verification and Validation

Many domains are trying to improve safety by incorporating human factors principles into their system requirements. However, incorporating these principles and methods creates challenges for verification and the validation processes. This panel will discuss verification and validation challenges for human factors professionals involved in the design and development of complex human-operated systems, how they are addressing these issues now, and what is needed to address future challenges.

Relations between personality, knowledge, and behavior in professional service encounters

AbstractWe report two studies that tested hypotheses about relations between personality, knowledge about service encounters, and performance in service encounters. A novel method for measuring knowledge was used. In one study, we measured undergraduates' personality, knowledge, and skill in handling service encounters in jobs performed by human factors professionals. The other study reanalyzed data reported by Motowidlo, Crook, Kell, and Naemi about volunteers' personality, knowledge about volunteer service encounters, and job performance. Both studies found that knowledge about service encounters is correlated with effectiveness in service encounters, even when effects of personality are controlled. Conscientiousness was correlated with this knowledge. We discuss implications of personality in the development of knowledge about effective behavior in social situations at work.

Defining Thumb Reach Envelopes for Handheld Devices

Our objective is to provide thumb reach envelopes to help guide the placement of controls on handheld devices and to provide useful methods to gather and analyze thumb reach data. With the proliferation of handheld, interactive devices, such as cameras, mobile phones, game systems, and remote controls, human factors professionals involved in designing these products need data to help guide the placement of controls. Previous studies have not provided adequate two-dimensional thumb reach envelopes for the primary control surfaces of handheld devices. A total of 90 participants in three groups (adolescent females, young mothers, and young fathers) placed representations of primary controls in preferred locations on a device model and "painted" their individual reach envelopes on a touch-screen device running a paint application. We present two-dimensional thumb reach envelopes on the primary control surface for handheld devices. The primary reach zone for adolescent females is slightly larger and more circular than that of the adults. The preferred location for controls matches the primary thumb reach zones fairly well. The reach envelopes presented are the first of their kind and are likely to be useful to human factors professionals. The method used to obtain the data may also be useful. The thumb reach envelopes should be applicable to the design of many handheld, interactive devices with dimensions similar to the models used in this study. The method presented allows design teams to collect and analyze thumb reach data quickly and inexpensively for different target user populations or product dimensions.

How Can We Eliminate Error When We Have No Consistency?

Consistency is one of the most universally articulated usability principles for user interface (UI) design. Everyone who works in this field harps on about the importance of consistency of navigational style, terms used, screen layout, instruction format, illustrative style, text layout, and consistency of control mechanism, to name a few categories typically mentioned.Thus, to the extent that the software developers, engineers, and designers with whom we collaborate listen to us human factors professionals (and they increasingly do), UIs in the healthcare arena are becoming quite consistent. Newer electronic medical record (EMR) systems and medical device UIs are very consistent. You will also find a lot of consistency among the dozens of screens of the most recent programs that articulate with implanted defibrillators, the UIs of the latest ultrasound systems, large-volume infusion pumps (LVPs), patient-controlled analgesia pumps (PCAs), in vitro diagnostic systems, etc.The problem is that this consistency does not extend beyond individual systems (really subsystems) or devices—we've achieved intra- but not inter-system consistency. At any hospital, for example, you will find a pretty decent UI with the EMR system for running the pharmacy and a pretty decent UI with the system for running the surgical suite. However, the two will be completely different, and will also be different from the hospital-wide systems used to order supplies, keep track of outpatients, and track emergency room admissions.Some of the associated system UIs have been developed in-house by information technology (IT) departments, others by outside contractors, and yet others are off-the-shelf products. Inevitably, healthcare professionals who use these systems have to keep track of the fact that, for example, selections are made with check-off boxes in one system, while equivalent selections are made with pull-down menus in another.Users have to learn color-coding conventions and symbol sets that often contradict each other. They have to remember that what one system calls “format,” another calls “layout,” and so on. A nurse learns a set of alarm conventions with one infusion pump, and another set for a different pump. The two pumps may be used with the same patient (such as an LVP and a PCA), or the hospital may have a new contract with a different manufacturer, which means that all the old pumps are of one type, and the new ones are of another. Staff on the hospital floors may use one pump and those in the surgical suites another.In other words, what we're dealing with is the Wild West. Is it any wonder, then, that there is an ongoing epidemic of use errors? We can blame “error-prone” healthcare professionals as much as we like, but as long as we subject them to this between-device and between-system inconsistency, errors will occur.Indeed, the emphasis the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has placed on reducing device use errors recently, is without a doubt, resulting in safer devices. But it is not really addressing the between-device inconsistency that challenges healthcare professionals, let alone patients, as devices and systems increasingly move out of the hospital and into the home.The ultimate problem is that there is no mechanism for achieving system-wide consistency for users. There is only a mechanism in place to achieve consistency of specific devices and subsystems, since that is where the decisions are made and regulations apply. Until that changes, patients and healthcare professionals are going to have to cope with the Wild West.

Learning about Healthcare: Preparing Human Factors Professionals for a Career in Healthcare

Formally trained human factors professionals are in increasing demand from medical device companies, health care systems, and electronic health record (EHR) vendors to ensure successful device design, EHR deployment, and overall usability and quality improvement initiatives. Most members of this panel have extensive experience working in the healthcare domain, while one is starting a career in healthcare. The panelists will exchange their views on the challenges and rewards of learning about healthcare in order to be effective in making contributions to health care. Specific initiatives human factors professionals can take to learn about healthcare will be introduced and discussed. Human factors professionals and students should expect steep a learning curve, as well as strong support from clinicians and other health care workers, which will be discussed.

Case Study: Evaluating the Design and Warnings of a Tanning Bed

When human factors professionals are retained to evaluate a product and its labeling after an injury, other relevant information must be considered to determine if additional warnings may have led to a different outcome. This case study evaluates an incident where a woman alleged that a tanning bed had inadequate warnings. When evaluating the case, the product design, user interface, and relevant communication system standards were considered along with the plaintiff’s personal knowledge and behavior. The warnings were also evaluated in the context of the tanning establishment and its trained employees. This case illustrates the circumstances when manufacturer’s product design and labeling was not a causation factor of an incident.

Human Factors–Focused Reporting System for Improving Care Quality and Safety in Hospital Wards

The aim was to develop a reporting system for collecting human factors problem reports to establish a database to guide activities for improving health care quality and patient safety. The current error and incident report systems do not provide sufficient and adequate coverage of the factors contributing to impaired safety and care quality. They fail to examine the range of difficulties that clinical staff encounters in the conduct of daily work. A voluntary problem-reporting system was developed to be used by hospital wards' clinicians and was tested in four wards of two hospitals in Israel. The system is based on human factors--formatted problem reports submitted by physicians and nurses on difficulties and hazards they confront in their daily work. Reports are grouped and evaluated by a team of human factor professionals. A total of 359 reports were collected in the wards during 12 weeks, as compared with a total of 200 incidents reports that were collected during a period of 5 years with the existing obligatory incident reporting system. In-depth observational studies conducted on the wards confirmed the ability of the new system to highlight major human factors problems, differentially identifying specific problems in each of the wards studied. Problems reported were directly related to general factors affecting care quality and patient safety. Validation studies confirmed the reliability of the reporting system in pinpointing major problems per investigated unit according to its specific characteristics. This type of reporting system could fill an important information gap with the potential to be a cost-effective initial database source to guide human factors efforts to improve care quality, reduce errors, and increase patient safety.

Optimizing the Design of Preprinted Orders for Ambulatory Chemotherapy: Combining Oncology, Human Factors, and Graphic Design

To establish a set of guidelines for developing ambulatory chemotherapy preprinted orders. Multiple methods were used to develop the preprinted order guidelines. These included (A) a comprehensive literature review and an environmental scan; (B) analyses of field study observations and incident reports; (C) critical review of evidence from the literature and the field study observation analyses; (D) review of the draft guidelines by a clinical advisory group; and (E) collaboration with graphic designers to develop sample preprinted orders, refine the design guidelines, and format the resulting content. The Guidelines for Developing Ambulatory Chemotherapy Preprinted Orders, which consist of guidance on the design process, content, and graphic design elements of ambulatory chemotherapy preprinted orders, have been established. Health care is a safety critical, dynamic, and complex sociotechnical system. Identifying safety risks in such a system and effectively addressing them often require the expertise of multiple disciplines. This study illustrates how human factors professionals, clinicians, and designers can leverage each other's expertise to uncover commonly overlooked patient safety hazards and to provide health care professionals with innovative, practical, and user-centered tools to minimize those hazards.

A Human Factors Perspective : Auditory Alarm Signals

s International. 40/09B, 4543 (University Microfilms No. 8004002), 1979. 13. Momtahan KL. Mapping of psychoacoustic parameters to the perceived urgency of auditory warning signals [dissertation] 14. Hellier E, Edworthy J. On using psychophysical techniques to achieve urgency mapping in auditory warnings. Applied Ergonomics, 30, 167-171, 1999. 15. Brewster SA, Wright PC, Edwards A. Experimentally Derived Guidelines for the Creation of Earcons, in Proceedings of HCI 95, Huddersfield, UK, pp. 155-159, 1995. 16. McGookin DK, Brewster SA. An investigation into the identification of concurrently presented earcons. Proceedings of the 2003 International Conference on Auditory Display, Boston, MA, USA,

The development of a tool to predict team performance

The paper describes the development of a tool to predict quantitatively the success of a team when executing a process. The tool was developed for the UK defence industry, though it may be useful in other domains. It is expected to be used by systems engineers in initial stages of systems design, when concepts are still fluid, including the structure of the team(s) which are expected to be operators within the system. It enables answers to be calculated for questions such as “What happens if I reduce team size?” and “Can I reduce the qualifications necessary to execute this process and still achieve the required level of success?”.The tool has undergone verification and validation; it predicts fairly well and shows promise. An unexpected finding is that the tool creates a good a priori argument for significant attention to Human Factors Integration in systems projects. The simulations show that if a systems project takes full account of human factors integration (selection, training, process design, interaction design, culture, etc.) then the likelihood of team success will be in excess of 0.95. As the project derogates from this state, the likelihood of team success will drop as low as 0.05. If the team has good internal communications and good individuals in key roles, the likelihood of success rises towards 0.25. Even with a team comprising the best individuals, p(success) will not be greater than 0.35.It is hoped that these results will be useful for human factors professionals involved in systems design.

An Investigation of the Prevalence of Replication Research in Human Factors

The present studies investigated the nature of replication research within the human factors literature. Many claim that researchers in certain fields do not replicate prior research. This is troubling because replications allow science to self-correct. A successful replication corroborates the original finding, whereas an unsuccessful replication falsifies it. To date, no one has assessed whether this issue affects the field of human factors. In the first study, eight articles (parent articles) were selected from the 1991 issues of the journal Human Factors. Each article that had referenced one of the eight parent articles between 1991 and September 2006 (child articles) were also retrieved. Two investigators coded and compared each child article against its 1991 parent article to determine whether the child article replicated its parent article. The second study replicated these procedures. Half or more of the parent articles in Study I and Study 2 (75% and 50%, respectively) were replicated at least once. Furthermore, human factors researchers conducted replications of their own work as well as the work of others. However, many researchers did not state that they replicated previous research. Replications seem to be common in the human factors literature. However, readers may not realize that a study replicated prior research. Thus, they may incorrectly assess the evidence concerning a given finding. Human factors professionals should be taught how to identify replications and to be cautious of research that has not been replicated.

Messages and Medical Behaviors: DTCA's Influence on Healthcare Consumer Thinking and Doing, and How We Can Help

Pharmaceutical direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) has grown exponentially and is suggested to increase perceived medication needs and patient drug requests. However, its impact on healthcare consumer safety is not well-understood. This effort sought to examine DTCA healthcare consumer effects and their public health and practical implications. During spring 2008, 2767 individuals were asked, through public intercept interviews, about pharmaceutical DTCA: recalled products, exposure frequency, exposure medium, and impact on a range of health-related behaviors and beliefs. Consumers report inundation with DTCA, with 8 of 10 respondents indicating exposure to messaging within the past 30 days. Television was the medium with the most noted impressions; direct mail, the least (although still >35%). Most impressions reported were for Viagra and Claritin. One of four participants reported cognitive or behavioral changes as a result of viewing DTCA: advertisements prompted people to believe they had an illness/condition, to seek more information, to schedule provider visits, and to ask providers about symptoms or medications during regular visits. Moreover, almost 1 in 5 reported an increased willingness to share their prescription medication with others if they saw it in DTCA, indicating that DTCA exposure may increase this risky behavior. DTCA are nearly ubiquitous yet consumers remained attuned to the message content. The effects of DTCA are complex and range from beneficial (e.g., information-seeking) to detrimental (e.g. medication-sharing). Interestingly, participants do not readily differentiate prescription versus over-the-counter DTCA. Increased attention to understanding DTCA appears worthwhile, perhaps targeting provider awareness of message effect, further regulation and modification of DTCA messaging, and enhancing DTCA media literacy as a component of health literacy. Human factors professionals have the right toolset to play an active role in these efforts.

Debate: Is there Low Hanging Fruit in Healthcare Human Factors?

Does Human Factors and Ergonomics have anything to contribute to patient safety and healthcare practices? Most people would say yes. However, there is great controversy as to the form the contribution can take. Can this contribution be made in the form of standards, recommended practices, and principles of human factors? Or must our contribution consist of the dedication of human factors professionals within the domain of healthcare? Some assert that healthcare is so complex that simple guidelines and best practices will not solve any significant problems; all worthwhile problems require the in-depth, sophisticated techniques performed by human factors professionals. This session will present a debate that examines these issues. The results of the debate may help focus healthcare human factors toward the most productive approaches for influencing healthcare and patient safety.

Systems modelling approaches to the design of safe healthcare delivery: ease of use and usefulness perceived by healthcare workers

The UK health service, which had been diagnosed to be seriously out of step with good design practice, has been recommended to obtain knowledge of design and risk management practice from other safety-critical industries. While these other industries have benefited from a broad range of systems modelling approaches, healthcare remains a long way behind. In order to investigate the healthcare-specific applicability of systems modelling approaches, this study identified 10 distinct methods through meta-model analysis. Healthcare workers' perception on ‘ease of use’ and ‘usefulness’ was then evaluated. The characterisation of the systems modelling methods showed that each method had particular capabilities to describe specific aspects of a complex system. However, the healthcare workers found that some of the methods, although potentially very useful, would be difficult to understand, particularly without prior experience. This study provides valuable insights into a better use of the systems modelling methods in healthcare. Statement of Relevance: The findings in this study provide insights into how to make a better use of various systems modelling approaches to the design and risk management of healthcare delivery systems, which have been a growing research interest among ergonomists and human factor professionals.

Human Factors Requirements: Being Involved in the First Stage of System Development

One of the common refrains among human factors professionals is “We need to be involved earlier in the process.” One of the earliest stages of any project is requirements definition. However, developing requirements is not a skill many of us learned in school. Requirements definition is not easy even for other engineering domains. At a minimum, a well written requirement expresses a necessary and verifiable characteristic of the end system in simple, clear, and concise language. Necessary characteristics are those aspects of a system that can be traced to technological or user need. Requirements that are verifiable are those that can be proven not necessarily only by testing, but could be confirmed through inspection or demonstration as well. Finally requirements must be written in simple, clear and concise language in order to ensure that there is no ambiguity in its interpretation. There are many who think it is a quixotic task to write clear, verifiable and effective requirements that involve humans. Some of the arguments are that humans are too unreliable for testing or that there are few known thresholds in human related factors as such human factors requirements are not verifiable. The result is human factors professionals have not been brought in to the requirements definition process. Even when human factors professionals are included, they may be challenged by the complexity of the job. In this panel, highly experienced human factors professionals who have worked in a variety of domains (e.g., military, government, commercial, and academia) will discuss identifying and writing good human factors requirements, lessons learned on becoming a part of the requirements definition process, how to teach requirements writing to new human factors professionals, and a framework for capturing the nuances of human factors requirements.

Human Factors Considerations in Global Positioning System (GPS) Receiver Technology: Contrasting Military Technical Requirements with User Expectations

This paper presents only the opinions of the authors for a forum of other Human Factors professionals. No representation of The Aerospace Corporation, GPS Wing, US Air Force, US Army, or US Department of Defense (DoD) policy is implied or intended. The need for human factors considerations in the development of handheld GPS receiver technology becomes increasingly apparent as society becomes increasingly dependant on precision navigation and timing information. GPS receivers provide ubiquitous situational awareness, during the daily mundane commute or in theater amidst the fog of war. Both military and commercial receivers are only as useful as their ability to convey navigation information to the user in a timely and reliable manner. Warfighters have become familiar with the ease and convenience of commercial receivers, mapping functionality, and integrated technology. However, there is great variance between the requirement set for military operations and civilian applications. The US Army and Air Force GPS Wing face future expectation management issues with military GPS user equipment. Potential areas for risk mitigation include careful human factors considerations early in the requirements development process, platform and application tailoring, incorporating “best practices” from industry and commercial end-user experience, and education and training.

Application of a Participatory Methodology for Investigating Personal Fall Arrest System (PFAS) Usage in the Construction Industry

The participatory workshop is a new concept of design in which developers, end users, and researchers work together to design a product or service. This approach is still in its experimental stage as applied to studying jobs in the construction industry. In the current study, a participatory workshop was conducted to generate ideas for an improved Personal Fall Arrest System (PFAS) design and another workshop was held to generate ideas on fall protection training. In addition to generating ideas about PFAS design and fall protection training, the data collected through the workshop process was used to create three personas that served, at the end of the project, as vehicles for summarizing the research results. The workshop method is more commonly used by designers, but can provide useful information that can complement data from surveys or laboratory investigations conducted by human factors professionals and others interested in user-centered design.

A History and Primer of Human Performance Modeling

Human performance models are abstractions, usually mathematical or computational, that attempt to explain or predict human behavior in a particular domain or task. This includes a wide range of techniques and approaches, from ideas that are most likely familiar to the majority of human factors professionals (such as signal detection theory) to more novel and complex approaches (such as computational models of dual tasking while driving). This chapter provides a sampling of modeling approaches and domains to which those approaches have been applied; for a more in-depth review, see Pew and Mavor (1998). We also discuss some of the issues faced by modelers as well as describe some of the rich history of the modeling endeavor over the past 50 years.