Abstract: In the progress of urbanization, serious crashes on curved sections of urbanization highway are a significant problem. The main reason is that urbanization highways have an impact on drivers’ physiological status. In this paper, three road simulation scenarios were implemented in a driving simulator: ‘non-urbanization highway’, ‘semi-urbanization highway’ and ‘urbanization highway’. Drivers’ physiological features were studied by observing their heart rate growth rates. The results demonstrate that heart rate growth rate was significantly affected by the degree of urbanization of the highway. On curved segments of urbanization highway, heart rate growth rate changes and vehicle speed fluctuations were significant. Moreover, heart rate growth rates in the uplink direction of curves were higher than those in the downlink direction. Speed and heart rate growth rate were highly correlated. Within the same degree of urbanization highway, drivers’ heart rate growth rates first decreased and then increased with increasing speed. A correlation model of the degree of urbanization, vehicle speed and heart rate growth rates is proposed and used to derive safety thresholds based on heart rate growth rate. The safety thresholds of heart rate growth rate were 7.6%, 22.0% and 37.0% at ‘good’, ‘fair’ and ‘poor’ levels, respectively. The main results provide a basis for identifying dangerous road sections and improving the driving comfort and safety of urbanization highways. PubDate: 2019-03-21 DOI: 10.1007/s10111-019-00550-x
Abstract: The theoretical contribution of this paper lies in introducing the concept of social fidelity to bridge the gap between computer technology and collaborative learning activities in simulator-based training. The concept has usually been limited to the technological aspects of simulator training with an assumption that a high level of fidelity equals a high physical resemblance between a simulator and the real work environment. The objective of this article is to expand the prevailing understanding of the concept of simulator fidelity and explore social factors that may influence perceived training quality among professional maritime officers. This qualitative study aims to broaden the scope from technological aspects to an emphasis on task and collaborative factors. The empirical material used is based on observations of two different simulator programs for professional maritime officers and focused interviews with bridge officers participating in the sampled training. The research aims to deepen the knowledge on how learning unfolds in a simulator-based training context characterised by extensive use of advanced computer technology and collaborative activities. The research demonstrates how trainer–trainee interactions, task factors and simulator technology may influence perceived level of fidelity and training quality. The article is concluded by offering a set of recommendations for future design of maritime simulator-based training. PubDate: 2019-03-12 DOI: 10.1007/s10111-019-00549-4
Abstract: The aim of the present paper is to demonstrate how a subset of methods from Cognitive Work Analysis (CWA) in combination with Social Network Analysis (SNA) can be used to analyse the effects of a reduced crew in a legacy system of a commercial airliner’s two-pilot-crew operations. Whereas existing research approaches have used different methodological approaches such as classical workload evaluations, we focus on social organisation and cooperation at early conceptual design stages. A case study of Reduced-Crew Operations (RCO) in commercial aviation highlights how Work Domain Analysis, Control Task Analysis and Social Organization and Cooperation Analysis were applied to allocate functions and identify future automation requirements. Furthermore, the SNA shows the possible interactions in future RCO. The effect of technological failure on the network architecture’s resilience is also explored. A proposal on how to react to a data-link outage and break-up in RCO is made with respect to limitations in technology. In this way, the work can foster identifying automation requirements and related possible failures at early stages in the design process. PubDate: 2019-02-26 DOI: 10.1007/s10111-019-00548-5
Abstract: According to decision by the rector of University of Tampere, a version of the paper was submitted and published due to negligence. PubDate: 2019-02-21 DOI: 10.1007/s10111-019-00543-w
Abstract: This study takes upon a group cognition perspective and investigates the cognition of railway traffic operations, in particular railway traffic and passenger traffic control. A table-top simulation environment is used to conduct the study, in which its design principles are elaborated upon. Network cognition is operationalized through communication content and flow and studied through social network analysis (SNA). SNA centrality metrics, such as degree, closeness and betweenness, are assessed in these networks. As part of the study, two cases are compared where operational procedures for disruption mitigation are varied. The dependent variables are the different types of communication network structures that are conceptualized for communication flow and semantic network structures for communication content. Although the quantitative comparisons between the two operational procedures regarding their communication flow and semantic networks showed no significant differences, this study provides a methodology to compare different conditions. PubDate: 2019-02-14 DOI: 10.1007/s10111-019-00546-7
Abstract: Previous research has shown a potential bottleneck of communication of information between the sonar controller (SOC) and operations officer (OPSO) in submarine sound and control rooms. This research aimed to see if this bottleneck could be removed by co-locating the sound and control room teams. Further, it also looked at the effects of reducing the crew numbers. Ten teams preformed the return to periscope depth tasks during high and low demand in a simulated submarine control room. Activities and communications of the teams were recorded and compared with data from a baseline condition of contemporary operations. The findings show that the co-location of the sound room and control room teams relieved the bottleneck of communications between the SOC and OPSO. Although communications increased, this was more balanced across team members and more relative to operational demand. This was coupled with more efficient task completion, resulting in greater number of tasks being completed by the command teams. Reduced crewing led to greater communications between the remaining members of the team together with task shedding in the higher demand condition. Future research should contrast these findings with objective measures of task performance to better understand potential performance benefits. PubDate: 2019-02-14 DOI: 10.1007/s10111-019-00542-x
Abstract: The prevalence of mobile phone usage in traffic has been studied by road-side counting, naturalistic driving data, surveillance cameras, smartphone logging, and subjective estimates via surveys. Here, we describe a custom-made smartphone logging application along with suggestions on how future such applications should be designed. The developed application logs’ start and end times of all phone interactions (mobile phone applications, incoming/outgoing phone calls and text messages, audio output, and screen activations). In addition, all movements are automatically classified into transport, cycling, walking, running, or stationary. The capabilities of the approach are demonstrated in a pilot study with 143 participants. Examples of results that can be gained from smartphone logging include prevalence in different transportation modes (here found to be 12% while driving, 4% while cycling, and 7% while walking), which apps are being used (here found to be 19% navigation, 12% talking, 12% social media, and 10% games) and on which road types (rural, urban, highway etc.). Smartphone logging was found to be an insightful complement to the other methods for assessing phone use in traffic, especially since it allows the analyses of which apps are used and where they are used, split into transportation mode and road type, all at a relatively low cost. PubDate: 2019-02-13 DOI: 10.1007/s10111-019-00547-6
Abstract: There is widespread consensus that teamwork constitutes one of the key requirements in today’s multidisciplinary and highly complex system of delivering care. In recent years, increasing attention has been given to questions of how to define, teach, measure, and improve teamwork in healthcare. However, one cannot help but feel a certain disconnect between this ongoing trend in healthcare with an associated bias towards judgemental and normative language, and contemporary thinking in safety science that explores concepts from complexity thinking, such as emergence and resilience. The aim of this critical review is to contrast prevailing approaches to teamwork in healthcare with current concepts in safety science. After identifying relevant articles through multiple formal search methods, we found that, although current teamwork literature acknowledges a lack of comprehensive investigations linking team training in healthcare and patient outcomes, the predominant strategy to achieve safety remains a traditional, reactive approach that regulates behaviour and constrains performance variability. As this strategy is focussed on competencies, much of the responsibility for unwanted results is pushed towards the ‘sharp end’ by the quality agenda, emphasizing personal and professional competence while obscuring systemic issues. Teamwork, while indispensable in the highly subspecialized reality of healthcare, is oftentimes reduced to an aggregated set of individual behaviours. It appears that in the current state of entangled quality and safety agendas, medicine has settled for a reductionist and moral approach towards teamwork to manage the associated complexities, thereby accepting a simplistic but intellectually impoverished and ethically questionable understanding of the concept. PubDate: 2019-02-12 DOI: 10.1007/s10111-019-00545-8
Abstract: Non-technical skills in high-reliability industries include decision making, interpersonal communication and personal resilience. It has been argued that these skills are key to effective performance, safety and welfare. However, there is no agreed upon set of such skills or formal means to identify and assess them for incident commanders in the UK fire and rescue service (FRS). The aim of this research was to identify the non-technical skills that underpin effective incident command in the UK FRS, and to develop a behavioural marker system that captures these skills. Our research assessed the current range of training offered in non-technical skills across the UK FRS, and identified the non-technical skills of incident command within the UK FRS through interviews with incident commanders, and workshops with subject-matter experts. The six non-technical skills were: assertive, effective and safe leadership; effective decision making and planning; interpersonal communication; personal resilience; situational awareness; and teamwork and interoperability. A bespoke behavioural marker system, called THINCS, was developed with exemplary behaviours for each skill. PubDate: 2019-02-08 DOI: 10.1007/s10111-019-00539-6
Abstract: Interaction with automated systems and other types of technologies seems inevitable and almost a requirement of human work. The aviation sector, and in particular air traffic control, is devoting considerable efforts towards automation, to respond to the increased demand for capacity. Project AUTOPACE investigated the impacts of foreseeable automation over human performance and behaviour. The purpose was to identify new training requirements for air traffic controllers under foreseeable automation scenarios. In addition to the research carried out under the remit of AUTOPACE, the functional resonance analysis method was used to explore how the interactions between human operators and technology may change, as new automation features would be introduced into ATC operations. The FRAM model was developed based on AUTOPACE concept of operations, two levels of automation (E2 and E1) and was then used to instantiate three different non-nominal situations that were also investigated by the project. This paper presents the FRAM-based analysis carried out and discusses the potential impacts of automation, considering uncertainty and variability as two critical aspects that emerge from complex operation scenarios. The relation with AUTOPACE work is continuously established and the added value of FRAM for the pursuit of further AUTOPACE work is argued. PubDate: 2019-02-02 DOI: 10.1007/s10111-019-00540-z
Abstract: The development of automated vehicles continues unabated. The human factor challenges of designing safe automated driving systems are critical as the first several generations of automated vehicles are expected to be semi-autonomous, requiring frequent transfers of control between the driver and vehicle. Conditional automation raises particular concerns about drivers being out of the loop. A driving simulator study was performed with 20 participants to study driving with conditional automation. We observed driver performance and measured comfort as an indicator of the development of trust in the system. One scenario used a more capable automation system that was able to respond to most events by slowing or changing lanes on its own. The other scenario used a less capable automation system that issued takeover requests for all events. Participants drove both scenarios in counterbalanced order and experienced the different capabilities as changes in reliability. The automation would behave one way in the first work zone and a different way in the second. We observed three types of comfort profiles over the course of the drives. Several behavioral measures, notably gaze, showed effects of reliability variations. Trust calibrated during the first-driven scenario was seen to affect behavior during the second one, and this effect was more pronounced in the older age group, and most pronounced for women in that group. PubDate: 2019-02-01 DOI: 10.1007/s10111-018-0522-y
Abstract: Due to the ongoing development in automated vehicle technology, conditionally automated driving (CAD) will become a realistic scenario within the next years. However, an increasing automation in driving tasks and taking the driver out of the loop increases the risk of monotony and fatigue brought on by boredom. Whether the driver is still able to take over the vehicle guidance at system limits is questionable. Therefore, the aim of the current driving simulator study is to investigate how prolonged monotonous periods of conditionally automated driving affect passenger fatigue level and the take-over performance and how both is affected by voluntary non-driving-related activities (NDRA). For this purpose, two conditions (encouraging fatigue and encouraging alertness by engaging in voluntary NDRA) were tested in a 60 min conditionally automated drive followed by a take-over situation. Twenty-five percent of the participants in the fatigue encouraging condition temporarily showed strong evidence of fatigue or they fell asleep. However, the time of occurrence of fatigue phases varied among individuals (occurrence mainly after 20–40 min of automated driving). The take-over performance in the take-over situation after 60 min of CAD did not deteriorate in the fatigue condition compared to the alertness condition. PubDate: 2019-02-01 DOI: 10.1007/s10111-018-0524-9
Abstract: In the future, car-to-car communication and car-to-infrastructure communication will be a central part of automated driving experience. Cooperative interactive driving is seen as a promising approach, in which cars interact cooperatively with drivers and the environment. However, to ensure drivers’ acceptance and their trust in such systems, it is important to understand the underlying mechanisms of human cooperation in traffic context. Therefore, this study investigated potential influencing parameters for cooperative behaviour in a lane change situation on a highway. As central influencing parameters the situation’s criticality and the distance in time and space to the driver asking for cooperation were manipulated. This was done by selecting appropriate levels for the time to collision (TTC) in conjunction with the variation of distances to other involved agents. In a video-based experiment with the perspective of driving on the left lane, 43 participants (M = 23.2 years; SD = 4.26 years) had to decide if they would give way to a driver in the right lane situated behind a slower truck. The results showed that the willingness to cooperate was strongly influenced by aspects of the situation: the driver’s costs (operationalized by the distance in time and space to the driver asking for cooperation) and the criticality of the situation for the other driver. A large distance in time and space to the driver asking for cooperation and, therefore, low costs of cooperation facilitate the driver’s willingness to cooperate via accelerating and decelerating. The results also indicated that in situations with high criticality drivers seemed to show strong uncertainty about how to behave or solve this situation. Consequently, cooperatively interacting systems with well-developed user interfaces might support drivers’ cooperative behaviour in critical situations. PubDate: 2019-02-01 DOI: 10.1007/s10111-018-0523-x
Abstract: The topic of situation awareness has received continuing interest over the last decades. Freeze-probe methods, such as the Situation Awareness Global Assessment Technique (SAGAT), are commonly employed for measuring situation awareness. The aim of this paper was to review validity issues of the SAGAT and examine whether eye movements are a promising alternative for measuring situation awareness. First, we outlined six problems of freeze-probe methods, such as the fact that freeze-probe methods rely on what the operator has been able to remember and then explicitly recall. We propose an operationalization of situation awareness based on the eye movements of the person in relation to their task environment to circumvent shortfalls of memory mediation and task interruption. Next, we analyzed experimental data in which participants (N = 86) were tasked to observe a display of six dials for about 10 min, and press the space bar if a dial pointer crossed a threshold value. Every 90 s, the screen was blanked and participants had to report the state of the dials on a paper sheet. We assessed correlations of participants’ task performance (% of threshold crossing detected) with visual sampling scores (% of dials glanced at during threshold crossings) and freeze-probe scores. Results showed that the visual-sampling score correlated with task performance at the threshold-crossing level (r = 0.31) and at the individual level (r = 0.78). Freeze-probe scores were low and showed weak associations with task performance. We conclude that the outlined limitations of the SAGAT impede measurement of situation awareness, which can be computed more effectively from eye movement measurements in relation to the state of the task environment. The present findings have practical value, as advances in eye-tracking cameras and ubiquitous computing lessen the need for interruptive tests such as SAGAT. Eye-based situation awareness is a predictor of performance, with the advantage that it is applicable through real-time feedback technologies. PubDate: 2019-02-01 DOI: 10.1007/s10111-018-0527-6
Abstract: Automated vehicles (AV) are expected to be integrated into mixed traffic environments in the near future. As human road users have established elaborated interaction strategies to coordinate their actions among each other, one challenge that human factors experts and vehicle designers are facing today is how to design AVs in a way that they can safely and intuitively interact with other traffic participants. This paper presents design considerations that are intended to support AV designers in reducing the complexity of the design space. The design considerations are based on a literature review of common human–human interaction strategies. Four categories of information are derived for the design considerations: (1) information about vehicle driving mode; (2) information about AVs’ manoeuvres; (3) information about AVs’ perceptions of the environment; and (4) information about AVs’ cooperation capabilities. In this paper, we apply the four categories to analyse existing research studies of traffic participants’ needs during interactions with AVs and results of the CityMobil2 project. From the CityMobil2 project we present central results from face-to-face interviews, an onsite-survey and two focus groups. To further support the AV designers we describe and rate different design options to present the information of the four categories, including the design of the infrastructure, the vehicle shape, the vehicle manoeuvres and the external human–machine interface of the AV. PubDate: 2019-02-01 DOI: 10.1007/s10111-018-0521-z
Abstract: The aims of the current study were to obtain factors contributing to inter-department patient handoff quality and to uncover characteristics of the current handoffs from the point of view of Chinese healthcare staff. A questionnaire was developed to obtain the staff’s views on inter-department handoffs. An online questionnaire survey was conducted between December 2016 and March 2017. A total of 490 valid responses were collected from physicians, nurses, and assistant nurses. Five handoff factors were derived by applying principal component analysis with 44% of cumulative variance accounted for. Significant differences were observed across three professional groups and assistant nurses had the most negative evaluations. However, a similar trend of views was shared, i.e., they showed a good understanding of their own roles and adequate communication during handoffs. In contrast, it was observed that patient care responsibility and information were sometimes discontinued. From the point of view of staff, the overall handoff quality was mainly affected by mutual communication, the handoff system and environment. The inadequacy of information transfer frequency was reported to be higher when receiving patients than when sending patients, particularly when receiving patients from the emergency or outpatient departments. Generally, healthcare staff in China had a high estimation of the overall quality and safety of inter-department patient handoffs. However, it was observed that information and responsibility were sometimes transferred inadequately. To resolve this discontinuity, we suggest a standardized handoff process, effective use of unlicensed staff and fostering a culture of error reporting and learning. PubDate: 2019-02-01 DOI: 10.1007/s10111-018-0500-4
Abstract: New in-vehicle information systems are now being commercialized. Despite the expected benefits, some concerns exist that they may overload drivers’ capacity and decrease performance. According to the multiple resource theory (Wickens, Hum Factors 50:449–455, https://doi.org/10.1518/001872008X288394, 2008), overload may occur at different stages of processing, that is, perceptual–central and/or response-related stages. Therefore, different measures may be needed to detect such specific demands. We explored the sensitivity of different mental workload measurements during the performance of an auditory task alone (single task) and in combination with a tracking task that was presented without (dual task) or, with a visual display (triple task). The demands associated with the number of concurrent tasks (single, dual and triple tasks), tracking speed (low, high, adjustable) and their interaction were analyzed. To account for different processing requirements, mental workload was assessed using subjective, behavioral (performance on the auditory task) and psychophysiological measurements (event-related potentials). 17 young adults participated in the study. The results showed that most measurements discriminated between the performances of one or more tasks, as well as between low and high speeds. However, only the subjective ratings and tracking task performance further discriminated between the dual- and triple-task conditions. Finally, ERPs (N1 and P3) were the only measure detecting increases in cognitive demands associated with higher requirements on processing speed combined with the addition of the display. Our results suggest that ERPs may provide complementary information to other traditional mental workload measures. Its applications in the evaluation and design of future systems should be investigated. PubDate: 2019-02-01 DOI: 10.1007/s10111-018-0485-z
Authors:Oliver Carsten; Marieke H. Martens Abstract: As long as vehicles do not provide full automation, the design and function of the Human Machine Interface (HMI) is crucial for ensuring that the human “driver” and the vehicle-based automated systems collaborate in a safe manner. When the driver is decoupled from active control, the design of the HMI becomes even more critical. Without mutual understanding, the two agents (human and vehicle) will fail to accurately comprehend each other’s intentions and actions. This paper proposes a set of design principles for in-vehicle HMI and reviews some current HMI designs in the light of those principles. We argue that in many respects, the current designs fall short of best practice and have the potential to confuse the driver. This can lead to a mismatch between the operation of the automation in the light of the current external situation and the driver’s awareness of how well the automation is currently handling that situation. A model to illustrate how the various principles are interrelated is proposed. Finally, recommendations are made on how, building on each principle, HMI design solutions can be adopted to address these challenges. PubDate: 2018-05-12 DOI: 10.1007/s10111-018-0484-0
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