automation

Virtual Assistants (automation) and Etiquette

December 6, 2011

This NYT article discusses the “new” scourge of rude people interacting with their phones in public via voice thanks in large part to Siri, Apple’s new virtual assistant. This article reminded me of something slightly different about human interaction with virtual assistants or automation. In a 2004 paper, researchers Parasuraman and Miller wondered if automation that possessed human-like qualities would [...]

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Rudder knob in cockpit mistaken for door latch

November 1, 2011
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Any aviation experts want to chime in about a knob turning a plane upside down? Also, please note this was characterized as “pilot error.” Pilot error causes airliner to flip, fly upside down From the article: According to the safety board, an analysis of the aircraft’s digital flight recorder indicated the co-pilot, alone in the cockpit while the captain used [...]

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Calibrating User’s Perception of Automation

August 11, 2011

Last week I had the pleasure of presenting in a symposium on automation in safety critical domains arranged by Dr. Arathi Sethumadhavan at the American Psychological Association annual meeting.  My fellow participants were: Arathi Sethumadhavan, PhD (Medtronic) Poornima Madhavan, PhD (Old Dominion University) Julian Sanchez, PhD (Medtronic) Ericka Rovira, PhD (United States Military Academy) Everyone presented on issues related to human-automation interaction.  I [...]

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Humans and Automation on the Colbert Report

August 1, 2011

Look! A human factors colleague on the Colbert Report! Does this mean we’re cool? Dr. Missy Cummings, Associate Professor at MIT Director of the Humans and Automation Lab The Colbert Report Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

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Are we too trusting of GPS automation?

July 26, 2011
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A GPS certainly makes life easier — and although I think many of us might consider what would happen if we were without it or it was unable to identify where we were, it is less often we consider how it may lead us astray. One of our early postings on the Human Factors Blog was about a bus driver [...]

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Harnessing your digital breadcrumbs

May 31, 2011
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This story in the Wall Street Journal discusses the wide-ranging research implications of collecting millions of data points from cell phone users. Most people carry smartphones. In addition to holding your contacts, your emails, and text messages, even the cheapest of todays smartphones are equipped with advanced sensor technology like accelerometers, GPS, magnetometers, etc.  It knows where you are even [...]

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Radiation: The Difficulty of Monitoring the Invisible – Post 2 of 2

April 27, 2011
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This post continues the list of articles on HF-related errors in radiation delivering healthcare devices. As Technology Surges, Radiation Safeguards Lag But the technology introduces its own risks: it has created new avenues for error in software and operation, and those mistakes can be more difficult to detect. As a result, a single error that becomes embedded in a treatment plan can [...]

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Radiation: The Difficulty of Monitoring the Invisible – Post 1 of 2

April 22, 2011
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Lately, I have noticed a plethora of stories on human factors mistakes with medical equipment that delivers radiation. I have collected them here for those who are interested in this problem. At times a computer bug was at fault, but often radiation overdoses came from: inadequate training (and perhaps a poor display, but those are not available for me to examine) non-transferrable mental [...]

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Driven to Distraction

April 19, 2011
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This editorial from MSN Autos nicely summarizes a topic we’ve covered many times:  in-car technology interfering with driving.  The central problem appears to be that in-car interfaces are designed in isolation–devoid of the context in which they will actually be used (while driving).  So the designs demand a high amount of attention and concentration. Expert on human-automation interaction Dr. John D. [...]

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Automation Issues Hit the Big Time on NPR

February 22, 2011

NPR brings home the safety issues of too much cockpit automation. From the NPR story: “It was a fairly busy time of the day. A lot of other airliners were arriving at the same time, which means that air traffic control needed each of us on very specific routes at specific altitudes, very specific air speeds, in order to maintain [...]

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False Alarms in the Hospital

February 16, 2011
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NPR pointed me to a two-series in the Boston Globe examining the incessant din of patient alarms. The monitor repeatedly sounded an alarm — a low-pitched beep. But on that January night two years ago, the nurses at St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center in Brighton didn’t hear the alarm, they later said. They didn’t discover the patient had stopped breathing until [...]

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Profiles in Human Factors: Dr. Julian Sanchez, Medtronic

January 25, 2011
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This post is the first in our new series of human factors career profiles. Dr. Julian Sanchez  was kind enough to answer my questions about his job and the journey he took to get there. Dr. Sanchez received his Ph.D. in psychology from the Georgia Institute of Technology and has worked in a variety of settings, from agricultural technology at Deere [...]

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Blogging APA Division 21: The Cost of Automation Failure

August 27, 2010
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Arathi Sethumadhavan, currently of Medtronic and recently of Texas Tech, was this year’s winner of the George E. Briggs dissertation award, for the best dissertation this year in the field of applied experimental psychology. Her advisor was Frank Durso. Her work was inspired by our need to increase automation in aviation, due to increases in air traffic. However, automation does [...]

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The Zero-Fatality Car

August 6, 2010
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I ran across this fascinating article from ComputerWorld on Volvo’s goal of creating a zero fatality car by 2020. As I read it, a number of human factors issues jumped out at me, but the focus is almost entirely on engineering issues. This does not mean Volvo will ignore the human factor. After all, I’ve previously posted on their well-done [...]

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Mining Tragedy Update

July 15, 2010
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There is new information on the West Virginia coal mine tragedy where the methane detectors were disabled to prevent automatic shut down of the machinery. This comes from NPR: Methane monitors are mounted on the massive, 30-foot-long continuous miners because explosive gas can collect in pockets near the roofs of mines. Methane can be released as the machine cuts into [...]

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Usability Potpourri

July 2, 2010

HF/Usability Potpourri returns with two recent items. iPhone Reception Display Reports from some sites suggest that at least some of the cellular reception issues of the new iPhone 4 are due to improper display of signal strength.  This is a neat HF issue because it involves user’s trust in automation (the display of reception bars is actually a computed value, [...]

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