Exploring the Use of Cognitive Work Analysis in Developing a Nuclear Power Plant New-State Vision

The United States nuclear industry needs to identify and implement a new strategy that will lower operating and maintenance costs while maintaining safety for existing plants. The industry must also have a clear and strategic vision of this transformative new state that focuses on ways in which technologies can be integrated to maximize the benefits of technology and people. While there are ongoing efforts in this area, this work discusses how the use of cognitive work analysis may offer further support. This paper provides an overview of cognitive work analysis, as well as the state of current new-state development efforts. The use of cognitive work analysis as a tool to enhance existing practices is presented to ensure the systematic and complete development of a new state vision.

Formative Modeling of Foster Care Work: A Cognitive Work Analysis Approach

In this paper we present the promise of the Cognitive Work Analysis (CWA) methodology, particularly abstraction hierarchy modeling, in the foster care domain. There is increasing interest in applying machine learning decision aids to foster care decision making, but that interest is accompanied by concerns that those aids may perpetuate systemic bias or be largely context-blind. Modeling the work conducted at different levels of the domain offers unique insights into where bias may enter the system as well as possible design implications for these future decision aids. This project models two major areas of work in the domain, management of individual cases and management of overall programs offered. These work areas are then considered in the first 3 levels of the abstraction hierarchy to display the promise that this model can hold for the domain in future work, particularly when supported with more naturalistic studies.

Designing Affordance-Based Procedures Using Heuristic Cognitive Work Analysis: Application to Triage in an Emergency Department

This study describes the concept of affordance-based procedure and its implementation in a triage station in a hospital emergency department. Rather than seeking to increase operators’ adherence to procedures, an affordance-based procedure (1) aims to induce task steps using affordances that also (2) support degrees of freedom for action. The design of this procedure was guided by the application of an extended version of cognitive work analysis, named “heuristic cognitive work analysis.” This design process produced a new procedural document: a reception card. Ten months after its implementation, a qualitative evaluation with 10 triage nurses shows that the reception card is viewed as supporting coordination between the different nurses’ tasks and providing an external memory to cope with frequent interruptions during high patient inflow, even though the document is used for convenience and with unexpected and partial uses of its items. The document assessed also afforded emerging benefits, that is, acceleration of ambulance release, higher level of confidentiality, assistance for staff hand-overs. Finally, novice triage nurses are particularly sensitive to the benefits brought by this affordance-based procedure.