trust

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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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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Coming to APA 2011: A Conversation Hour on Use of Electronic Health Records in Clinical Practice

August 2, 2011
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Drs. Kelly Caine (of guest post fame)  and Dennis Morrison will be presenting on human factors considerations for the design and use of electronic health records.  Audience participation is welcome as they discuss this important topic. See abstract below. In this conversation hour we will discuss the use of electronic health records in clinical practice. Specifically, we will focus on [...]

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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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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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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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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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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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Facebook and Privacy: A Guest Post by Kelly Caine

May 8, 2010
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Many of my friends have threatened to leave Facebook because of their concerns over privacy, but for the first time, this week one of them actually made good on the threat. In his “Dear John” letter, my friend Yohann summarized the issue: I don’t feel that I am in control of the information I share on Facebook, and of the [...]

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Trust & Electronic Medical Records

April 15, 2010
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The Consumerist recently posted on something we haven’t tackled in our posts on electronic medical records: patient trust and privacy. The California HealthCare Foundation recently released the results of a survey on electronic medical records and consumer behavior. The survey found that 15% of people would hide things from their doctor if the medical record system shared anonymous data with [...]

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