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The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has developed a Framework for Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS Framework) that supports system engineering analysis, design, development, operation, validation and assurance of CPS. Cyber-physical systems (CPS) comprise interacting digital, analog, physical, and human components engineered for function through integrated physics and logic. For instance, a city implementing an advanced traffic management system including real-time predictive analytics and adaptation/optimization must consider all aspects of such a CPS system of systems’ functioning and integrations with other systems, including interactions with humans. One Aspect (or grouping of stakeholder concerns) of the CPS Framework is the Human Aspect. NIST is engaging HFES in a panel discussion to elaborate Human Aspect concerns, such as constructs, measures, methods, and tools.

In the construction industry, recent literature has promoted a design for safety approach that discusses the benefits of considering safety from the very start of the project lifecycle. With this approach, non-construction personnel, such as owners and designers, need to work alongside constructors and subcontractors to consider safety during design and procurement stages of a project. This is a difficult process, particularly with the degree of fragmentation in the industry. Safety climate survey instruments have been developed to identify these sources of fragmentation among stakeholder groups, but most of these tools are directed toward on-site construction personnel. This paper describes the development of an inter-organizational safety climate instrument for measuring attitudes toward safety of construction industry stakeholders including owners, designers, construction managers, and subcontractors. Overall, the measurement model demonstrated a good fit with the data based on a confirmatory factor analysis. Therefore, the survey instrument provides a useful tool for researchers and practitioners to identify the sources of fragmentation in attitudes of construction project personnel toward worker safety that can affect occupational health and safety within the industry.

The Prevention through Design (PtD) initiative identifies the design stage as an opportunity to “design out” hazards and risks. An early emphasis on safety enables the reduction of opportunities for error and misuse in healthcare technology, and the corresponding safety and well-being of patients and providers. A pre-condition for preventive design is a deep understanding of users’ characteristics, goals, needs, and contexts of use. Standards recommend a user-centered design process coupled with ethnographic methods (e.g., self-report, observation) to gain this knowledge. However, current human factors methods may not provide an efficient means to explore the problem space during the concept stage. On-site observations require identification of an appropriate observation site, stakeholder buy-in, and IRB approval with adherence to HIPAA regulations. Off-site simulations require task scope, which limits design exploration before it has been initiated. Recommended self-report methods (e.g., interviews, focus groups) also have limitations. In previous work we found that the elicitation of experiences through “storytelling” resulted in the identification of significantly more context of use information than semi-structured interviews. The overall goal of this work is to present storytelling as a method rooted in narrative inquiry that aids designers’ understanding of usability requirements. We present a conceptual model for the role of storytelling in design informed by a synthesis of narrative and design research and apply the model to healthcare technology. We present the Design+Storytelling framework as a means for healthcare designers to operationalize storytelling in their work.

Background and Objectives: Caregiver burden associated with dementia-related agitation is one of the commonest reasons a community-dwelling person with dementia (PWD) transitions to a care facility. Behavioral and Environmental Sensing and Intervention for Dementia Caregiver Empowerment (BESI) is a system of body-worn and in-home sensors developed to provide continuous, noninvasive agitation assessment and environmental context monitoring to detect early signs of agitation and its environmental triggers. Research Design and Methods: This mixed methods, remote ethnographic study is explored in a 3-phase, multiyear plan. In Phase 1, we developed and refined the BESI system and completed usability studies. Validation of the system and the development of dyad-specific models of the relationship between agitation and the environment occurred in Phase 2. Results: Phases 1 and 2 results facilitated targeted changes in BESI, thus improving its overall usability for the final phase of the study, when real-time notifications and interventions will be implemented. Conclusion: Our results show a valid relationship between the presence of dementia related agitation and environmental factors and that persons with dementia and their caregivers prefer a home-based monitoring system like BESI.

Introduction Caregiver burden associated with dementia-related agitation is one of the most common reasons community-dwelling persons with dementia (PWD) transition to a care facility. Agitation in dementia can be defined as “inappropriate verbal, vocal, or motor activity that is not explained by needs or confusion per se” and is “consistent with emotional distress”. Agitation can be physically non-aggressive, aggressive, or verbally agitated behavior. Up to 90% of PWDs experience agitation and it is one of the principal factors for institutionalization. Agitation can be unpredictable, remain undetected in the early stages, and quickly escalate. Caregivers of PWD report high levels of emotional, physical, and financial stress and are susceptible to disease and health complications. BESI is an interactive, cybersociophysical system comprising of in-home and body-worn sensors, a caregiver tablet interface, online modeling, and caregiver notifications built to help detect the environmental triggers and early signs of agitation in PWD. Methods This is a mixed method, prospective study using descriptive, qualitative, and quantitative measures of caregiver-PWD dyads. Baseline psychosocial and behavioral status for both members of the dyad were assessed using validated assessment tools. Phase 1 (System Verification) - controlled settings (laboratory and homes of 2 healthy volunteers) and study settings (homes of 2 study dyads) & usability testing Phase 2 (System Effectiveness) - homes of 10 study dyads for 30 days each Home Visits First: provide detailed description of study, obtain informed consent, and document demographic and medical information. Second: complete assessment battery and BESI system installation. Results Phase 1 The tablet application usability was assessed and revised showing it to be a viable tool. We observed and documented caregiver emotional-state evolution over the day in relation to agitation episodes, the correlation between agitation events and accelerometer Teager energy magnitudes, and the variability in environmental parameters across rooms temporally and during agitation episodes. Audio levels did not yield enough information for more complex audio processing such as verbal agitation detection. We concluded that additional model training and evaluation was needed for physical agitation detection and PWD room localization. Phase 2 An upgraded audio data collection system was implemented to provide more complex audio processing. Comparing this with the verbal agitation episode reports on the tablet application, this method produced a 76.7% accuracy in detecting verbal agitation events. Multiple models were explored for physical agitation detection, with long short-term memory (LSTM) cell based recurrent neural network providing the highest performance. Decision rules was used to structure covariance factor retention for each dyad to feed into artificial neural network models. Doorway-based sensors and Markov models with room transition probabilities provided ∼90% room-level tracking accuracy of the PWD. Conclusions Phases 1 & 2 results facilitated targeted changes in BESI, thus improving its overall usability for the final phase of the study. This research was funded by This study is funded by the National Science Foundation Smart and Connected Health Program. [Grant Number 1418622]

The construction industry has adopted control measures of electrical hazards for decades, however construction workers are still electrocuted in the workplace every year. This problem leads to a need for assessing the quality of control measures. The goal of this study is to assess the control measures of electrical hazards using a perspective of hierarchy of controls (HOC). HOC counts control measures of five levels in descending effectiveness, which are Elimination, Substitution, Engineering, Administration, and Personal protective equipment. This study uses mixed methods of narrative text analysis and statistical analysis in examining 486 NIOSH recommended controls from fatality investigations. Findings reveal that behavioral controls remain prevalent in electrical hazard mitigation even though the knowledge of construction safety and health has increased in the past decades. This study also finds that effectiveness of controls is not statistically different by construction type nor occupation. Proposing a solution, the authors suggest that construction managers strictly stick to HOC rules by giving priority to higher level of controls and highly recommend that the U.S. construction industry leverage its prevention strategy by embracing more technological innovations and incentivizing prevention through design.

Advances in sensing, wireless communication, and data analytics have enabled various monitoring systems for smart health applications. However, many challenges remain to deploy such systems in actual homes, such as achieving robustness, unobtrusiveness, fault tolerance, privacy, and minimal user burden. This paper presents how these challenges were overcome in the realization and successful prototype deployment of the Behavioral and Environmental Sensing and Intervention (BESI) system. BESI is designed to sense behavioral activities using wearables and monitor environmental parameters with in-home sensors. With such data, behavioral patterns can then be modeled to determine associations with environmental attributes and, when appropriate, real-time notifications or interventions can be made based on these models. Challenges in building platforms with residential deployment constraints are discussed. BESI is currently deployed for an in-home study on dementia, and the results are presented to illustrate data collection procedures and system performance.

Agitation in dementia poses a major health risk for both the patients and their caregivers and induces a huge caregiving burden. Early detection of agitation can facilitate timely intervention and prevent escalation of critical episodes. Sensing behavioral patterns for detecting health critical events is a challenging task. Wearable sensors are often employed for sensing physiological signals, but extracting possible biomarkers for confident detection of early agitation is still an open research. In this paper, we employ an ongoing iterative study to explore the motion biomarkers related to agitation in community-dwelling persons with dementia (PWD). This study uses accelerometers in smart watches to capture PWD behavioral patterns unobtrusively. Analysis of the feature space is performed using data from multiple subjects to discriminate among epochs of onset, preset, and offset of agitation while considering inter-person variability in real deployments. This paper shows the prospect of feature space analysis of the motion data for developing early agitation detection models to deploy in the wild.

Changes in the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) fall-protection guidelines for residential construction since late 2011 have required the use of fall-protection and fall-arrest systems for workers past a certain height. Evaluation of fall-arrest anchor capacity depends on placement within a structure and includes strength of connections, truss/rafter elements, and bracing. The purpose of this study was to explore the use of a displacement-rate test for evaluating the strength and stability of fall-arrest anchors connected to truss assemblies as a supplement to currently used drop-test methods. A two-truss assembly with bracing was used for comparison. A range of displacement rates from 254 mm/min (10 in./min) to 381 mm/min (15 in./min) was recommended for evaluating the capacity of truss assemblies. A comparison of truss-assembly failures found similar results for the displacement-rate test and the drop test. The addition of the displacement-rate test can provide valuable infor...

The use of open plan offices (OPOs) continues to increase globally. This increasing usage is often justified by the need to support more collaborative office work. Such practices as office hoteling, and touchdown stations using OPO designs are perceived to provide cost savings based on the more efficient use of space. However, the advantages of OPOs continue to be challenged in the literature, and many studies have identified negative consequences for work performance and worker satisfaction. As a complex sociotechnical system, OPOs have been difficult to study in any way that yields ecologically valid results. Research on OPOs has been conducted and can be separated into two primary categories: 1.) Controlled studies in laboratories; and 2.) Survey-based studies eliciting workers’ perceptions. There is a need for an organizing body of concepts and parameters to conduct OPO research that is ecologically valid and less constrained by the need for internal validity at the cost of realism. In this project, the research team developed a conceptual hierarchy (CH) to design an ecologically valid replication of an OPO. The CH provides a structural framework to conduct a single study or series of studies to explore work behavior in OPOs.

Returning to basic function and then to normalcy is important after a disaster. This level of resilience allows businesses to reopen, social and emergency services to act quickly and effectively in aiding citizens, and returns a feeling of safety and comfort to those affected. Unfortunately, those tasked with responding and managing the disaster are often overwhelmed and their decision-making taxed, causing the response itself to be inefficient. One way to aid disaster response teams is the introduction of a decision support system (DSS) to support decision making capabilities in time-critical situations. The purpose of this research was to create a framework for disaster recovery and a prototype DSS to aid both command center workers and those in the field. Our goal was to help make response easier and more efficient, as well as evaluate our prototype design for usability.

The inanimate bicycle symbol has long been used to indicate the animate activity of bicycling facility signs. In contrast, either the inanimate bicycle symbol or the animate bicycle symbol has been used interchangeably for the standard pavement symbols in bike lanes. This has led to confusion among pedestrians and cyclists alike. The purpose of this study was to examine two different designs (inanimate symbol vs. animate symbol) involved in the evaluation of perceived preference and glance legibility, and investigate sign design features on bicycle pictorial symbols. Thirty-five participants compared current bicycle signs (inanimate symbols) to alternative designs (animate symbols) in a controlled laboratory setting. The results indicated that the alternative designs (animate symbols) showed better performance in both preference and glance legibility tests. Conceptual compatibility, familiarity, and perceptual affordances were found to be important factors as well.

Smartphone technology has evolved into a multi-functional device with advanced capabilities, but this mobile technology remains inaccessible to many individuals with visual impairments or upper extremity disabilities. This paper provides a heuristic checklist for accessible smartphone interface design, developed through reviewing existing design standards and guidelines and validating these guidelines with user involvement. Specifically, a set of preliminary user requirements (59 items) was extracted from existing standards, guidelines, and user requirements regarding mobile handheld device accessibility. Subsequently, the requirement set was filtered using a participatory method and then integrated to create an operational version of design guidelines. These guidelines were then used in a heuristic evaluation and usability testing on high-fidelity prototypes produced by a commercial manufacturer. A heuristic checklist for designing accessible smartphones was formed, which may also be applicable to other touchscreen handheld devices (e.g., printer screen) in terms of accessibility features. The initial set of 59 user requirements was re-organized into 44 statements in six general categories: mechanical controls, display, speech and general operation controls, audio feedback controls, touch-operated controls, and others. Using results from both qualitative and quantitative methods provides support, though with some limitations, for this accessibility checklist. This checklist is intended as a practical design support tool for use in early design phases of handheld products. A number of challenges and limitations are discussed as well.

With the number of people with visual impairments (e.g., low vision and blind) continuing to increase, vision loss has become one of the most challenging disabilities. Today, haptic technology, using an alternative sense to vision, is deemed an important component for effectively accessing information systems. The most appropriately designed assistive technology is critical for those with visual impairments to adopt assistive technology and to access information, which will facilitate their tasks in personal and professional life. However, most of the existing design approaches are inapplicable and inappropriate to such design contexts as users with visual impairments interacting with non-graphical user interfaces (i.e., haptic technology). To resolve such design challenges, the present study modified a participatory design approach (i.e., PICTIVE, Plastic Interface for Collaborative Technology Initiatives Video Exploration) to be applicable to haptic technologies, by considering the brain plasticity theory. The sense of touch is integrated into the design activity of PICTIVE. Participants with visual impairments were able to effectively engage in designing non-visual interfaces (e.g., haptic interfaces) through non-visual communication methods (e.g., touch modality).

The overall quality of haptic user interfaces designed to support visually impaired students' science learning through sensorial feedback was systematically studied to investigate task performance and user behavior. Fourteen 6th- to 11th-grade students with visual impairments recruited from a state-funded blind school were asked to perform three main tasks (i.e., menu selection, structure exploration, and force recognition) using haptic user interfaces and a haptic device. This study used several dependent measures that are categorized into three types of variables: (a) task performance including success rate, workload, and task completion time; (b) user behavior defined as cursor movements proportionately represented from the user's cursor positional data; and (c) user preference. Results showed that interface type has significant effects on task performance, user behavior, and user preference, with varying degree of impact to participants with severe visual impairments performing the tasks. The results ...

Out-of-plane loading of trusses occurs when a horizontal force is applied to the truss perpendicular to the plane of the truss. Because trusses are not specifically designed for lateral loading, the behavior of trusses during construction before adequate bracing is installed is unknown. Examples of out-of-plane loading include wind and seismic forces, as well as forces from fall-arrest anchors attached to trusses during construction. The purpose of this paper was to measure the maximum load and rotation of a single truss exposed to a horizontal out-of-plane load applied by a fall-arrest anchor. A specialized testing fixture was used to apply a horizontal load to a single unbraced truss attached to two stem walls, representing a typical construction application. A set of monoslope queen-post trusses with two different pitches were used, and load was applied at both the truss eave and peak. Maximum loads for a single truss were much less than the expected 8 kN required to act as a personal fall-arre...

BACKGROUND Open plan offices have proliferated for the past several decades with more and more workers being concentrated in office buildings. Several studies have identified a number of negative factors associated with open plan offices, and those include noise, speech interference, lack of privacy, and a perceived loss of control over work. While negative factors have been identified several times in the literature, many studies rely on either surveys or highly controlled environments. OBJECTIVE The objective of this study was to use a quasi-naturalistic environment based on a scaled world model to test three hypotheses of the impacts of office interference on editing and web navigation performance and mental workload. METHOD A mixed factor design was used that utilized continuous speech recordings, discontinuous speech recordings, and a quiet condition. Individual differences questionnaires were administered to measure focused attention, stress, and cognitive failures. After task completion, participants recorded mental workload ratings. RESULTS Participants had higher performance accuracy in the document editing task across the speech interference conditions. Mental workload ratings were higher in the web navigation task in the discontinuous speech condition compared to the continuous speech condition. In contrast to the hypothesis, those reporting stronger focused attention performed more poorly across all speech conditions. Overall, the results were mixed. CONCLUSIONS OPO work design must focus on individual differences among workers to determine how to customize design to facilitate performance.

The construction industry experiences the greatest proportion of workplace electrical injuries globally. Much research effort has gone toward analyzing this phenomenon, yet a majority of which focused on isolated elements while ignored the work system. Modern work systems are complex, within which humans interact with technology, social structures, and environments. Outcomes (including accidents and injuries) resulting from such a complex system are not attained by any system element in isolation. As a result, effective risk management requires the control over the whole sociotechnical system (STS). This work demonstrates such an effort in investigating STSs. The work uses a triangulation approach in examining construction-fatality reports. The findings identify three typical STSs, reveal their system weaknesses, and provide remedial recommendations. The work contributes to the knowledge body of risk management, electrical safety, and research methodologies. The introduced triangulation approach i...

Electrocution is one of the four leading causes of worker deaths in the construction sector, and thus it is paramount to identify its mechanisms. This work interprets the mechanisms of an electrical accident as a chain of decision mistakes throughout the entire task process. The objective of this paper is to visualize the decision-making chains in workplace electrical safety for construction workers. Because of construction’s “one-off” nature, the researchers narrow the decision-making chain for specific “features of work” (FOW), a group of distinct activities possessing higher occupational safety and health (OSH) risks and requiring particular attention. By analyzing National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) electrocution reports, the authors identify five features of work and illustrate their decision-making chains. This work promotes electrical safety and injury prevention through the decision-making lens and contributes to the scholarly body of knowledge by introducing a com...

Empirical comparisons of elicitation methods provide guidance to engineers for the selection of the best method for a given design goal. This work explores how alterations to the context (i.e, setting, prompts) of storytelling sessions impacted the types of user needs collected from 22 emergency room (ER) nurses. Six user need sets, comprised of 477 narratives detailing an experience relating to a healthcare quality aim, were quantitatively compared. The results of the study yielded a set of decision rules and decision trees to aid the selection of an appropriate storytelling protocol that facilitates formative usability design.

Educational systems, especially in STEM disciplines, continue to be challenging in terms of effective design of pedagogies and environments to support teaching and learning. There is a need for more empirical investigations of the effectiveness of specific pedagogies. As part of a cognitive communications curriculum for engineering and computer science students, learning modules were developed through a partnership between Virginia Tech and Norfolk State University. A quasi-experimental design was used, including pre- and post-test measures of cognitive communications self-efficacy and performance on lab assignments. Results were mixed in terms of effectiveness. Criteria for engagement were fully met and self-efficacy increased significantly for one of the self-efficacy items. However, student performance based on lab assignments did not fully meet the criteria. Issues contributing to the lack of effectiveness are discussed as well as extended analyses of the data to further explore student performance. .

Falls from heights in residential construction continue to be a leading cause of fatalities and severe injuries. Field studies are difficult to implement in residential construction, because companies are hesitant to allow observers on site to collect data while tasks are being conducted. Use of scaled world models has been recommended for experimental contexts that require high levels of ecological validity as well as internal (control) validity . In this project, we explored several attributes to design a scaled world model of residential roofing that would support controlled trials to evaluate usability and to conduct load testing, in a realistic setting. Features of the scaled world model were selected to support validity and ease-of-measurement while participants conducted roofing tasks. Several validity constraints were explored, including ecological, structural, psychological and process validity. Possible in-lab roofing task attributes were discussed and heuristic guidelines for scaled world models were provided. Lastly, an example of a scaled-world model was assembled to test the fall arrest system. The design team continues to develop the model, which will be reviewed by residential roofing experts for realism and accuracy.

Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education continues to be challenged by socioeconomic barriers and a lack of inclusive pedagogies. The Appalachian region serves as an appropriate test bed for inclusive design of STEM-based learning systems. Our goal was to design an inclusive learning system to support exposure to physics concepts for Appalachian children aged 3–5 years. Two methods were used to extract user requirements. First, a front-end evaluation elicited requirements from experienced Head Start teachers/social workers. Second, focus groups were used to elicit user requirements from parents. Results demonstrated unique requirements, including the need to design for the broadest developmental ages due to financial constraints and the importance of relying on household items to support learning. Parents provided recommendations for best practices for research in rural, low-income regions. A logic model was developed to evaluate inclusive programme and product designs.

Although the influence of colour on size perception has been known for a century, there is only limited research on interventions that can reduce this effect. This study was therefore undertaken in order to identify appropriate interventions and propose design guidelines for information visualisation, especially in applications where size judgement is critical. The colour size illusion was replicated on an LCD monitor, revealing that yellow images appeared the smallest among a series of red, yellow, green and blue images on a white background. Three types of interventions (background brightness, border colour and background grid brightness) were tested to identify conditions that reduce the colour illusions, but none proved to be statistically significant. Based on these experimental results and an extensive literature survey, a set of design guidelines is proposed to enhance the usability of LCD monitors and a set of design recommendations given to extend these guidelines to applications in the field of ...

According to a 2006 Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report, approximately 90% of construction companies employ 20 or fewer workers; of these, 30% specialize in residential construction. Contractors with 10 or fewer employees are exempt from OSHA reporting requirements, unless a fatality occurs or an injury/illness leads to lost workdays for three or more employees (29 CFR 1904.1, Subpart B). This qualitative case study was conducted to understand character- istics and work patterns to develop a clearer understanding of the natural context of work, especially given the underre- porting of safety information by small construction companies. A prospective study was conducted in which construction workers logged critical incidents for four weeks. Definitions and examples of critical incidents were given to workers, along with a data logging notebook with structured questions. Workers could report the events immediately upon occur- rence or after the workday ended. A total of 102 critical incidents were reported. Content (axial coding) and cluster analy- ses were used to analyze the logs and to extract important descriptors and patterns. Results were used to characterize in- jury types, antecedents, time-of-day, and family-work involvement. Descriptions regarding the training-, resource-, and planning-related practices of small construction workers focused on the unique challenges that impose barriers and con- straints on safety climate.

Medical device designers must understand the complex context of use within a health care environment to ensure product usability. Designers must overcome domain-specific obstacles during usability research, such as patient privacy standards, which prevent designers from observing practitioners in context. In this project, we investigated storytelling as an alternative elicitation method for medical device requirements when direct observations are limited or not possible. While gathering requirements for an infusion pump, we compared the types of information elicited by focus groups, interviews, and storytelling sessions. Several advantages and implications for the use of storytelling in usability research are discussed.

Falls are a significant public health risk and a leading cause of non‐fatal and fatal injuries among construction workers worldwide. A more comprehensive understanding of casual factors leading to fall incidents is essential to prevent falls in the construction industry. However, an extensive overview of causal factors is missing from the literature. In this paper, 536 articles on factors contributing to the risk of falls were retrieved. One hundred and twenty‐one (121) studies met the criteria for relevance and quality to be coded, and were synthesized to provide an overview. In lieu of the homogeneity needed across studies to conduct a structured meta‐analysis, a literature synthesis method based on macro‐variables was advanced. This method provides a flexible approach to aggregating previous findings and assessing agreement across those studies. Factors commonly associated with falls included working surfaces and platforms, workers' safety behaviours and attitudes, and construction structure and facili...

The construction industry has experienced high numbers of occupational injuries and fatalities over the years. To address this issue, differences in safety attitudes and behaviours were explored among construction workers, first‐line supervisors, and project managers in small residential construction companies with respect to recommendations for safety interventions. A triangulation design consisting of observation (shadowing), subjective quantitative (questionnaire), and subjective qualitative (interview) methods was used to obtain different but complementary data on the same safety challenges. Shadowing was utilized to explore onsite safety problems and/or risky behaviours resulting from safety attitudinal discrepancies among the three groups. Questionnaires were administered to identify salient themes for the observed practices. Semi‐structured interviews were conducted to explore the causes of the observed safety problems. Results revealed that first‐line supervisors did not enforce safety rules stric...

Many organizations employ training systems to reduce work-related low back disorders. However, the evaluation of training programs is often not satisfactory, mainly due to the complexity of training systems, the high costs involved, heavy reliance on trainee reactions, and little integration of outcomes-based validation. In this work, we used the Revised Bloom's Taxonomy to classify the learning objectives of a training program. These classified objectives were then examined to predict training performance, and were further compared with trainee reactions using multiple regression and correlation analyses accordingly. Results indicated that the classified learning objectives were better predictors of training performance than trainee reactions. Practical implications of the results are discussed.

Falls remain the leading cause of injuries and fatalities in residential construction. Because of job-specific work conditions and environmental constraints, the various construction trades (e.g., roofing, siding, or framing) employ different safety standards and fall-protection training practices. The purpose of this study, therefore, was to explore the specific training needs and training preferences of small roofing subcontractors. A total of 20 roofing subcontractors participated in this study. A mixed methods approach, incorporating a survey and semi-structured interviews, was utilized. Results from this study revealed that an individual's job title (i.e., his or her role on the jobsite) and the employer's existing training methods were accurate predictors of the employee's preferred training methods. This study also suggests the need for improved fall hazard awareness among roofing workers via training. Context-relevant methods and workers' preferred physical forms in receiving training were identified and found to be most effective for safety training and learning in the workplace.

Although usability practitioners have successfully applied usability engineering processes to increase the usability of interaction designs, the literature suggests that usability practitioners experience a number of difficulties that negatively impact the effectiveness of their work, which in turn affects the effectiveness of the usability engineering processes within which they work. These difficulties include identifying and recording critical usability data and understanding and establishing relationships among usability data. These difficulties are particularly pronounced for novice usability practitioners. One approach to addressing these difficulties is through appropriate usability engineering tool support. We argue that existing usability engineering tools offer excellent support for helping experienced usability practitioners more efficiently do their jobs, but they provide little support for helping novice usability practitioners more effectively do their jobs. We introduce a tool feature, usability problem instance records, to better support novice usability practitioners. We describe the results of a study of this feature, which suggest that the feature helps to improve two aspects of the effectiveness of novice usability practitioners: reliability and quality.

Many interesting and promising prototypes for visualizing video data have been proposed, including those that combine videos with their spatial context (contextualized videos). However, relatively little work has investigated the fundamental design factors behind these prototypes in order to provide general design guidance. Focusing on real-time video data visualization, we evaluated two important design factors - video placement method and spatial context presentation method - through a user study. In addition, we evaluated the effect of spatial knowledge of the environment. Participantspsila performance was measured through path reconstruction tasks, where the participants followed a target through simulated surveillance videos and marked the target paths on the environment model. We found that embedding videos inside the model enabled realtime strategies and led to faster performance. With the help of contextualized videos, participants not familiar with the real environment achieved similar task performance to participants that worked in that environment. We discuss design implications and provide general design recommendations for traffic and security surveillance system interfaces.

This panel will focus on successful methods and strategies used to globalize Human Factors and Ergonomic (HF/E) research, education, and practice. An introduction will be provided that focuses on the increasing demands for professionals with a globalized mindset and cultural competence. Panelists will highlight successful projects or approaches that have helped to ensure the relevance of HF/E in an increasingly globalized society. Each panelist will share recommendations and lessons learned on how to globalize our discipline from their own perspectives in industry, government, and academia.

Informal training consistently occurs on construction worksites without planned or organized instruction or supervision. This study analyzes the benefits, circumstances, and means by which informal training occurs and construction workers' perceptions of job safety and potential hazards. Results indicated that construction owners had an overall positive view of informal training, with a few minor issues. The study also revealed that, although aware of dangers on the job, workers still often neglect safety measures and can benefit from informal training in day-to-day activities. The results should warrant more research on the topic of informal training in relation to construction safety and health and provides a context-based description of informal training.

Rapid construction projects and processes will become increasingly important as customers demand better project management performance and globally, as countries plan for and respond to the aftermath of natural and/or unnatural disasters. For use in expedited projects (as well as traditional projects), a rapid universal safety and health system (RUSH) was designed, developed, deployed, and evaluated. For its inaugural application, the RUSH was applied to a 106-hour construction project. Results from an initial application included a safe build in approximately 5 days without recordable incidents. More importantly, lessons were learned by a multidisciplinary team of researchers who observed safety 24/5 for the life of the project. Lessons learned and recommendations for future research are provided as a result of this experience.

In the U.S.A., Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDSs) are required by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Mental model theories of cognitive processing predict that information format inconsistencies can undermine usability and thereby worker safety and compliance. The present study explored whether information presentation priorities are dependent upon the population tested. Ninety participants were sampled from three populations (undergraduates, community volunteers, and firefighters). Participants sorted cards containing chunks of information comprised of MSDS headings and text. Mean rank analyses showed that health-related information was given higher priority than other information, such as reactivity or chemical make-up. While there were similarities for the different subgroups, the firefighters differed from the other two groups in several respects. Results were consistent with previous research on schema differences between groups based upon experience and expectations. Implications for MSDS design and application of usability and mental model approaches to improve safety communications are discussed.

Psychosocial factors are hypothesized to contribute to work-related musculoskeletal disorder (WMSD) development, although previous research has been largely epidemiological or has focused primarily on the shoulders, back and neck. The objective of this study was to quantify the effects of mental workload and time pressure on perceived workload and physiological responses of the distal upper extremity. A total of 18 typists completed nine 5-min typing sessions representing three levels of time pressure and mental workload. Levels were manipulated by adjusting typing speed and by requiring participants to perform arithmetic tasks while typing. Outcomes were measured in muscle activation levels, wrist postures and movements, key strike force and subjective assessments of workload. In general, increased time pressure increased muscle activation, key strike force and wrist deviations; and increased mental workload increased key strike force. Mental workload and time pressure mediated physical risk factors during typing to increase WMSD risk for the distal upper extremity.

Based on multiple year accessibility research experience, a set of design considerations was developed corresponding to the universal design guidelines to guide the development of more accessible mobile phones. The design considerations were intended to help designers who do not have much understanding of people with disabilities consider various possible use cases. Its usefulness was revealed during an evaluation with designers, and several possible improvements were identified: 1) more design considerations or use cases should be identified by disability types, and 2) it can be implemented as a multimedia tool that contains video clips of actual use cases.

User centered design and usability evaluation of mobile devices are becoming important activities in the development process of mobile products. This paper presents a case study and introduces different techniques to support the process of designing a menu system embedded into a mobile phone. These techniques facilitated a systematic user needs analysis in the early stages of the development life-cycle, to formulate a navigational structure for designing prototypes, to identify usability problems for iterative prototype design, and to develop design guidelines. The introduced techniques involve laddered grid methods to elicit users' mental models, focus groups, usability testing, and expert reviews. The advantages and disadvantages of each method used during the design project were summarized, and usability practitioners in the real environment of the mobile devices industry are advised to be selective the combination of items they incorporate to suit their purposes.

Rapid construction projects and processes will become increasingly important in the aftermath of natural and/or unnatural disasters. For use in expedited projects (as well as traditional projects), a Rapid Universal Safety and Health system (RUSH) was designed, developed and deployed. For its inaugural application, the RUSH was applied to a 106 hour residential construction project. This paper presents the formative evaluation based upon on-site data collection and a survey instruments administered just after the project to trades, managers and safety team members. No major incidents were recorded. The results will be discussed in terms of the observational and survey results.

As cell phones have expanded their functionality with enhanced mobile technology, use of cell phones has become complex. Although usability of cell phones has been improved by featuring hierarchical menu systems, designing comprehensible navigation in the menu hierarchy is still a major challenge to cell phone user interface (UI) developers as more diverse users are adopting cell phones. To develop an easy-to-use cell phone UI, an effective usability evaluation method (UE) is essential. While various usability evaluation methods (UEM) have been developed, laboratory-based usability testing produces high-quality usability data from actual users. Yet, the effectiveness of such testing can vary dramatically depending on what data is collected and how the data are analyzed. To provide a practical guidance for the effective laboratory testing, we developed a systematic evaluation methodology for cell phone user interfaces (SEM-CPU). SEM-CPU is specifically designed to integrate five empirical methods (scenario-based task performance, questionnaires, post-task interview, user observation, and retrospective think aloud) into a laboratory-based test in order to evaluate cell phone UIs. By following SEM-CPU, usability engineers should be able to (1) conduct laboratory-based testing with multiple empirical methods in an efficient way, (2) collect diverse but useful data to measure necessary usability attributes, (3) identify determinants of usability problems, and (4) integrate all usability data to generate proper solutions for the problems. Detailed descriptions of SEM-CPU are presented along with a case study where SEM-CPU was applied to a comparative cell phone usability test.

Building toys and models are vital for learning, yet accompanying assembly instructions are often confusing and difficult to use, especially for children. This exploratory study takes the first step toward developing a taxonomy of design variables and identifying features that may have the largest impact on the usability of pictorial assembly instructions. A secondary data analysis is employed comparing product ratings and reviews from an online retailer to the design factors of the corresponding instruction sets. Not surprisingly, results show a tremendous range of design formats and lack of standardization. However, several factors emerged that were associated more often with the instructions of highly rated products including pictures without text, color illustrations, structural and action diagrams, a higher number of instructions per frame, and one or two frames per page.

This paper describes the first of two parts of a research study. The overall objective of the research was to determine the effects of tailoring Internet portal content and presentation style to user requirements according to either or both of two HCI theories. This study involved user requirements gathering by using a portal containing hyperlinks as the test bed. Participants rated the hyperlinks according to importance and the descriptions of each hyperlink according to intuitiveness. Results are discussed in terms of user search behavior and specific search requirements.

Research and education aimed at reducing the crash risk of young drivers has become a top priority to researchers and educators around the world. This panel provides an overview of some of these recent and ongoing efforts. To that end, the purpose of this panel is to: 1) raise awareness of human factors and ergonomics researchers of research needs and problems relevant to teen drivers and education, 2) provide a forum for discussion in this area, and 3) provide a paper summarizing key issues including teenage drivers, driver education, and driver licensing.

The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act broadly regulates the content of Consumer-Directed Broadcast Advertisements (CDBA). Information processing capabilities of average consumers may be exceeded by broadcast advertisements that present too much information. The purpose of this study was to examine usability problems encountered by viewers of broadcast advertisements and to isolate “best practices” that facilitated information transfer. Two age groups, older and younger viewers, evaluated different prescription drug advertisements based on usability and provided verbal reports to open-ended questions in a focus group. Avoiding information overload, eliminating or reducing distracting stimuli, and slowing the rate at which information is presented are important usability guidelines that should be applied to content specifications.

Although the small size of handheld computers increases portability and mobility, it causes difficulty reading information displayed on a small screen. In an attempt to improve text readability of handheld computers, this study investigated the effects of screen orientation and margin on reading speed, comprehension, and subjective ease of reading with a handheld computer. A 2×2 within-subject factorial design was conducted with 16 participants reading text from a PDA. In addition, users' preference for the two factors and their experiences with reading with the PDA were elicited in a post-experiment questionnaire. Finally, usability problems encountered were discussed in the interview. The results of this study indicated that neither screen orientation nor margin had a significant influence on reading performance. No prevailing preferences for screen orientation and margin were found. Invaluable qualitative information regarding usability problems was identified, which, in turn, supports several recommendations to improve reading from small screens of handheld computers.

Purpose: This research describes the development and use of the Needs Analysis and Requirements Acquisition (NARA) framework to elicit and construct user requirements for the design of cell phones (which are a type of assistive technology) that are both usable and accessible to persons with disabilities. Method: Semi-structured interviews and a focus group were used to elicit information and a systematic approach was used to translation information into requirements (construct). Elicitation and construction are the first two stages of NARA. Results: Requirements for general and feature-specific phone attributes were identified, and several requirements were found to match six of the seven universal design principles. Conclusions: The study demonstrated that NARA is both a straight-forward and cost-effective method to develop user requirements and can be used throughout the development cycle.

Cellular telephones provide a portable means of communication and facilitate many communication tasks in daily life. Persons with disabilities, however, have limited access to these devices, which may be due to product designs that do not always consider their needs. Usability evaluations can identify the needs and difficulties when using cellular telephones, and those with disabilities are also likely to benefit from focused evaluations. The usability of cellular telephones was investigated among those with visual and upper extremity disabilities. Both objective and subjective evaluation methods were used to determine the effects of several telephone display and keypad design features. Lateral key pitch is reported here. Objective and subjective measures were similar among participant categories, with the 12 mm and 13 mm levels of lateral pitch generally the best across all measures. Results suggest keypad design features to consider when designing accessible cellular telephones. Universal design implications are also discussed.