Project Details
Projekt
PervaSafe Computing: Pattern-Based Wearable Assistants for Safety-Critical Human-Computer Interaction in Control Rooms
Subject Area
Image and Language Processing, Computer Graphics and Visualisation, Human Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous and Wearable Computing
Term
from 2020 to 2024
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 425868829
Control rooms represent a crucial component of society, safeguarding the security and well-being of humans in a variety of life situations, whether they are involved in deploying ambulances, managing traffic or guaranteeing an uninterrupted supply of power, gas, or water. Humans that operate control rooms bear a major responsibility and have to rely on proper tool support. While available information and communication technologies have improved in the past 30 years, user interfaces in control rooms are still characterized by WIMP paradigm applications available at stationary devices with displays of various sizes as primary outputs. Too little focus is on the human operators’ abilities and needs.The main objectives of this project cover and link Research Area 1 and Research Area 2 of the priority programme call. In particular, we want:- to derive design patterns as vocabulary and a pattern language for scalable interaction design in control rooms following a human-centered and participatory design process. Patterns are based on tasks, workflows and operators’ needs in a variety of safety-critical domains with respect to daily routine and critical situations, different levels of automation as well as individual and cooperative work (Research Area 1).- to design a wearable framework for control room operators, determining how wearable technologies can be used both to implement the aforementioned design patterns and to evaluate their usage in-situ and unsupervised (Research Area 1 and 2). As part of these studies, control room operators’ cognitive load and affective state are modelled on a user-worn computer, and used to influence information flow to the operator. This attention model is used to present alarms and other control room events appropriately (Research Area 1 and 2). The wearable framework also assists operators in log-keeping of processes/tasks at hand, using wearable sensors that detect specific manual actions.- to validate and evaluate the resulting design patterns and their realization with the aid of wearable assistants in highly realistic but reproducible settings with actual control room operators, in particular with respect to usability and user experience (Research Area 2). Formative and summative evaluation measures will be implemented. User experience research is guided by the question: Do control room operators perceive a wearable assistant based on design patterns as patronization (with respect to autonomy or expertise) or support (with respect to safety)? Regarding usability, expert evaluations and user studies are performed. Three different control room scenarios guide the overall process (energy control room, fire and rescue services control room, ship bridge as a “mobile control room”). By reaching these objectives, this research will contribute to a better understanding of suitable interaction paradigms for control rooms and safety-critical pervasive computing environments (PervaSafe Computing) in general.
DFG Programme
Priority Programmes
