Evidence for Human-Centric In-Vehicle Lighting: Part 1

Today, up to hundreds of RGB and W-LEDs are positioned in a vehicle’s interior context and are able to be individually controlled in intensity, color and sequence. However, which kind of illumination distracts or supports car occupants and how to define such a modern illumination system is still under discussion and unknown. For that, first a definition for an in-vehicle lighting system is introduced. Second, a globally distributed study was performed based on a free-access online survey to investigate in-vehicle lighting for visual signaling within 10 colors, eight positions and six dynamic patterns. In total, 238 participants from China and Europe rated color preferences, color moods, light-position preferences, differences between manual and autonomous driving and also different meanings for dynamic lighting patterns. Out of these, three strong significant (p < 0.05) color preference groups were identified with a polarized, accepted or merged character. For the important driving-signaling mood attention, we found a significant hue dependency for Europeans which was missing within the Chinese participants. In addition, we identified that light positioned at the door and foot area was globally favored. Furthermore, we evaluated qualitative results: men are primarily focusing on fast-forward, whereas women paid more attention on practical light usage. These findings conclude the need for a higher lighting-car-occupant adaptation in the future grounded by deeper in-vehicle human factors research to achieve a higher satisfaction level. In interdisciplinary terms, our findings might also be helpful for interior building or general modern cockpit designs for trains or airplanes.

Sensing and Human Factors Research: A Review

Human experts are integral to the success of computational earth observation. They perform various visual decision-making tasks, from selecting data and training machine-learning algorithms to interpreting accuracy and credibility. Research concerning the various human factors which affect performance has a long history within the fields of earth observation and the military. Shifts in the analytical environment from analog to digital workspaces necessitate continued research, focusing on human-in-the-loop processing. This article reviews the history of human-factors research within the field of remote sensing and suggests a framework for refocusing the discipline's efforts to understand the role that humans play in earth observation.

Checklist Usage in Secure Software Development

Checklists have been used to increase safety in aviation and help prevent mistakes in surgeries. However, despite the success of checklists in many domains, checklists have not been universally successful in improving safety. A large volume of checklists is being published online for helping software developers produce more secure code and avoid mistakes that lead to cyber-security vulnerabilities. It is not clear if these secure development checklists are an effective method of teaching developers to avoid cyber-security mistakes and reducing coding errors that introduce vulnerabilities. This paper presents in-process research looking at the secure coding checklists available online, how they map to well-known checklist formats investigated in prior human factors research, and unique pitfalls that some secure development checklists exhibit related to decidability, abstraction, and reuse.

A REAL-TIME INTEGRATIVE LIGHTING SYSTEM FRAMEWORK BASED ON MACHINE LEARNING

Smart lighting systems are based on sensors and tunable lighting systems are increasingly more prevalent, but collecting, analysing, and using the large data generated by these sensors are challenging. Inspired by research on evolutionary algorithms, it can be hypothesized that an adaptive lighting system can operate in real-time by adjusting its output through a decision-making algorithm based on data mining techniques. Such an adaptive lighting system requires two-order input from users; initial and continual. Initial conditions provide training to the system through human factors research investigating the interaction between humans and their environment. Continual conditions are provided by data collected through sensors in real-time, and they continuously feed into the decision-making algorithm to adjust the output to meet occupants’ biological and psychological needs. Research indicates that artificial intelligence techniques, such as evolutionary algorithms, can emerge as good candidates for this framework.

Dual Tasking during Trip Recovery and Obstacle Clearance among Young, Healthy Adults in Human Factors Research

Trip-induced falls are extremely common in ergonomic settings. Such situations can lead to fatal or non-fatal injuries, affecting the workers’ quality of life and earning capacity. Dual tasking (DT) is a leading cause of trips and ineffective obstacle clearance among workers. DT increases their attentional demand, challenging both postural control and concurrent secondary tasks. As the human brain has limited attentional processing capacity, even young, healthy adults need to prioritize duties during DT. This article aimed to analyze these secondary task types and their applications in recent trip-related studies conducted on young, healthy adults. An extensive review of the recent trip-related literature was performed to provide a condensed summary of the dual tasks used. In previous trip-related literature, distinct types of secondary tasks were used. The choice of the concurrent task must be made vigilantly depending on the occupation, environmental context, available resources, and feasibility. DT can be used as a tool to train workers on selective attention, which is a lifesaving skill in ergonomic settings, especially in the occupations of roofers, construction workers, or truck drivers. Such training can result in successful obstacle clearance and trip recovery skills, which eventually minimizes the number of falls at the workplace.

Leveraging Social Media for Human Factors Research in Health Care

There has been a significant increase in using social media for academic research and there is an opportunity for human factors professionals to incorporate these platforms into their research. Social media platforms provide a rich space to study extant data on health information communication, behaviors, and impacts and to recruit study participants. In this session, panelists will discuss using social media to study health-related topics including health management, gender-based violence, disaster response, self-harm, patient ergonomics, and secondary impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. They will share how they have collected and analyzed data and recruited study participants from social media platforms such as Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook. They will also speak to the benefits and challenges of as well as ethical implications for using social media for research. There will be space for a moderated discussion to identify ways social media can be leveraged for human factors research in health care.

HF/E Practitioners: Shared Experiences from Industry

There are many challenges that researchers face when adapting from academic backgrounds to industry. How do we train newcomers to this field to focus on goals in context of their business’s needs? How do we ensure impact early in their career? How do we learn to look beyond the process, methods, mindset, and story-telling, to delivering on corporations’ anticipated needs? What are the challenges when mandating practitioners’ research to translate to actionable items? How do practitioners drive impact that brings the desired value to their corporations? How does one encourage user experience (UX) as an integral process within corporations’ development plans? This panel of practitioners will share the trials and tribulations they have encountered while successfully navigating their respective Human Factors and Ergonomics (HFE) careers. This panel represents peers with diverse experiences from careers in technology, product design, human-computer interfaces (HCI), medical devices, usability testing, and human factors research.

Patient Safety Risks during On-Demand Telehealth Referrals and Implications for Human Factors Research

The COVID-19 pandemic has rapidly accelerated the adoptionof on-demand telehealth as a way to keep patients and providers safe from viral transmission. However, theconstrained timelines and challenging conditions under which telehealth was implemented along with the factthat many patientsand providers are interacting in a new modality raisesconcerns about the potential for unintended patient safety risks that have yet to be fully understood. With the surge in telehealth patient volumeduringthe pandemic,on demand telehealth has served as a way to triageand refer patients who need additional in-person evaluation and treatment. One safety concern is whether patients who are referred are successfully following through on in-person care referrals as thefailure to seekin-person care may lead to increased risk of delayed or missed diagnosis. This study aimsto evaluate whether patientsare successfully fulfilling their in -person referralsfollowingareferralfromon-demandtelehealth through retrospective analysis of a subset of telehealth referral datafrom a large healthcare system. Of the 911 on-demand telehealth visitswith a referral to in-person care, only 689showed anin-person care encounter following the telehealthvisit and only 75-85% ofmore immediate urgency in-person referrals were fulfilled within the recommended time period of 24 hours. This preliminary data highlights theneed for amore comprehensiveanalysisof the telehealth referral processand the application of human factors methodsto understand and address barriers and risks associated with telehealth referrals and successful follow up.

Human Factors Considerations in Satellite Operations Human-Computer Interaction Technologies: A Review of Current Applications and Theory

Satellite operations are a subset of remote operations that draw similarities with remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) and uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) operations. Increased research into boredom, complacency, habituation, and vigilance as they relate to satellite operations is required due to a lack of prevalence in the literature. Circadian rhythms, crew resource management, and shift work dynamics may exacerbate complacency-driven automation bias and social loafing errors in satellite operations. This overview of theory and applications aims to specifically focus on satellite operations literature within human factors research to identify areas requiring an expansion of knowledge. The human-in-the-loop commonality enables human factors lessons to be passed to satellite operations from unrelated sectors to mitigate catastrophic human error potentially. As such, this literature review details the need for increased research in satellite operations human factors.