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The HFES Diversity Committee is entering its third year following many years existing as a task force. We have built a series of annual meeting content over the past years, with panels introducing the task force and then the committee; last year, we shifted focus to highlight examples of HFE research advancing diversity, inclusion and social justice. We continue to build off of previous years’ sessions – last year concluded with several questions seeking practical, concrete advice and suggestions to advance DISJ through HFE research and within the society. Therefore, this year we present an alternative format session that will function as a group of mini-workshops: two focused on research, one on broadening participation in HFE and one of inclusive excellence within HFE training and education. Session participants will develop “how to” knowledge and leave with a network of likeminded peers, colleagues and potential collaborators.

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.

Much research has sought to understand student success and capture this knowledge in terms of underlying theory. Prior work has provided an accounting of the factors that explain why students decide to leave and, to some extent, why students persist on to graduation. In spite of research, there continues to be a gap between theory and practice. Many times, theoretical findings have not translated well into programs and actions that have significantly improved student success outcomes. This research shifts the focus from trying to understand why students leave or stay in college to understanding the needs of students as the basis for improving student success outcomes.

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]

Agitation in dementia patients is characterized by several features, such as physical and verbal aggressive and non-aggressive behaviors. Such behaviors affect not only the patients, but also the caregivers’ quality of life. The onset of agitated behaviors can be unpredictable and can also be influenced by environmental factors, which presents challenges to caregivers. The work presented here is part of a research which is aimed at implementing a cyber-socio-physical model to monitor agitation epochs in persons with dementia (PWD). We present a data framework which was developed for the implementation of the cyber -socio- physical system. The data framework helps to collect, structure, extract, analyze and interpret multiple forms of qualitative and quantitative data obtained through behavioral and environmental sensors. This approach helps to conceptualize the lived context of PWD. The information acquired will be used to generate trained models to identify the patterns of agitation associated with the environmental factors. It will also be used to develop a monitoring and dashboard system which sends real time notifications to caregivers and healthcare providers. The research outcome will provide cost effective technology to reduce or prevent agitation in dementia.

In residential constructions, falls are the most serious causes of all fatal injuries. The elevation of these falls are relatively lower in almost all cases. Although there are rules for the usage of proper fall arrest systems (FAS) during the construction works, these rules are not properly enforced in residential roofing. In this research by using two types of FASs across two scaled models, different performance times (don time, doff time, tar paper setting time and shingle setting time) were measured. Two scaled models were built in indoor and outdoor location to see whether change of context affects the performance times. Data were analyzed by using SAS 9.4™.

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.

Did you know the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society has a Diversity Task Force (DTF)? Did you ever wonder what the Task Force is doing or what it is supposed to be doing? The HFES DTF has been active for many years in various roles in our professional Society. This panel is designed to help the membership understand the role of the DTF in advancing the strategic initiatives of the Society by providing examples of current work and demonstrating objectives of the DTF. Some areas to be discussed include education, outreach, military, and research. The Q&A will be an interactive session to generate new ideas and interests about the future of the DTF. Attendees will be asked to share inputs to address the evolving needs of diversity and inclusion in HFES.

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).

Various assistive technologies such as haptic technology are used to help people with visual impairments comprehend complex information. Yet there is likely to be a misconception that users with the same disability category share the same user interface needs; furthermore, the majority of the literature has been oriented toward total blindness rather than low vision, possibly leading to dissatisfaction with assistive technologies and discontinuation of its use by those with low vision. The aim of this article is to advance the understanding of the needs of those with low vision especially in relation to haptic-incorporated multimodal user interfaces. A scenario-based, participatory design approach was used to explore their needs. A total of 19 user needs were systematically documented under three categories: audition (n = 5), touch (n = 11), and vision (n = 3). This article focuses on qualitatively exploring their needs and theoretically interpreting the needs in the light of previous studies.