Human factors and ergonomics

The article stems from the main informative gaps of Design for Sustainable Behaviour and discusses the paramount role of a data-driven approach to inform design. The article stresses how quantitative data can address global sustainability, determine behaviours to modify, measure the impact of new learned sustainable behaviours as well as support the definition of behaviour change strategies, widening the spatial and temporal scales to communities and longitudinal studies and reducing unpredictable biases coming from tacit knowledge externalization and interpretation.

Keywords: data mining , human behaviour , sustainable design , user-centred design

Since its beginning at the end of 2019, the pandemic spread of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (Sars-CoV-2) caused more than one million deaths in only nine months. The threat of emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases exists as an imminent threat to human health. It is essential to implement adequate hygiene best practices to break the contagion chain and enhance society preparedness for such critical scenarios and understand the relevance of each disease transmission route. As the unconscious hand–face contact gesture constitutes a potential pathway of contagion, in this paper, the authors present a prototype system based on low-cost depth sensors able to monitor in real-time the attitude towards such a habit. The system records people's behavior to enhance their awareness by providing real-time warnings, providing for statistical reports for designing proper hygiene solutions, and better understanding the role of such route of contagion. A preliminary validation study measured an overall accuracy of 91%. A Cohen's Kappa equal to 0.876 supports rejecting the hypothesis that such accuracy is accidental. Low-cost body tracking technologies can effectively support monitoring compliance with hygiene best practices and training people in real-time. By collecting data and analyzing them with respect to people categories and contagion statistics, it could be possible to understand the importance of this contagion pathway and identify for which people category such a behavioral attitude constitutes a significant risk.

Keywords: Azure kinect , Body tracking , Hygiene best practices , Occupational safety , Pandemics containment , Safety training

Technical documentation is evolving from static contents presented on paper or via digital publishing to real-time on-demand contents displayed via virtual and augmented reality (AR) devices. However, how best to provide personalized and context-relevant presentation of technical information is still an open field of research. In particular, the systems described in the literature can manage a limited number of modalities to convey technical information, and do not consider the 'people' factor. Then, in this work, we present a Context-Aware Technical Information Management (CATIM) system, that dynamically manages (1) what information as well as (2) how information is presented in an augmented reality interface. The system was successfully implemented, and we made a first evaluation in the real industrial scenario of the maintenance of a hydraulic valve. We also measured the time performance of the system, and results revealed that CATIM performs fast enough to support interactive AR.

Keywords: Augmented reality , Context-aware , Human-centered design , Human-computer interaction , Industrial , Information manager , Maintenance , Technical documentation

The enabling technologies of the Industry 4.0 program can support the smart factory of the future to face the challenges related to their sustainable growth. In particular, given the progressive ageing of the population, it is mandatory to develop systems able to preserve operators' wellbeing and to prevent the incidence of work-related musculoskeletal disorders. By exploiting a recently introduced low-cost sensor we developed and validated a reliable prototype for automatic assessment of ergonomic postural risk in the factory shopfloor. Encouraged by the results of the validation process, we enhanced the prototype functionalities. The tool will serve both as a monitoring system for the evaluation of postural risk and a training system for increasing operators' awareness. In this paper, we describe the design of the prototype and the enhanced functionalities of the final version, - the ErgoSentinel.

Keywords: Ergonomics , I4.0 , Kinect® V2 , Postural risk assessment , RULA , Sustainable work

The purpose of this work is to help the little patients of the Paediatric Onco-Haematology Department of the “Monica and Luca Folonari” bone-marrow Transplant Centre to tackle their anxiety and worries when subjected to Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) clinical examinations, in order to reduce the period of time between the arrival of a patient in the Diagnostics Department and the actual exam execution. To do so, following the principles of the Medical Play Therapy, a user-centred role play called JUNIOR-MRI has been developed. The game is addressed at children between the ages of 5 and 10 and consists of a scaled model of a real MRI machine, with a gurney, a patient doll and a control station. A tablet application has also been developed to simulate the procedure of the clinic exam, reproduce the real sounds of a MRI through a loudspeaker placed on the scale MRI and show some fake images of the investigation carried out on the doll. The child plays the role of the doctor, getting acquainted with the exam procedure and instrumentation and learning not to fear the clinic exam. The experimental phase of the game has begun, and the JUNIOR-MRI is now used in the Pediatric Diagnostics Department of the Spedali Civili di Brescia, following an ad-hoc clinic protocol.

Keywords: Design methods , Medical Play Therapy , Role play , User-centred design

We present the design and test of a wearable device capable to detect the user's trunk orientation with respect to the gravitational field and to provide tactile stimulation to correct tilted positions. Vibrations are delivered to the shoulders, the frontal and dorsal parts of the trunk, by using the human body as an indicator of the four cardinal directions. The device was experimentally tested in normal gravity conditions by thirty-nine volunteers. The efficacy of tactile cues was investigated in comparison to visual and visuo-tactile cues. The results revealed that, despite the fact that the time needed to complete the task was shorter when people were guided by visual signals, the tactile cues were equally informative and, in some cases, the trunk spatial orientation was even more accurate. Overall, tactile cues were evaluated by users as more intuitive, effective and accurate.

Keywords: Haptics , Trunk orientation , Wearable device

Museums have been subjected to important changes in the approach they use to involve visitors. Among the other trends, storytelling and interactive exhibitions are two of the most used approaches used to make exhibitions more interesting for users. Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality methods can be effectively used in the context of a museum exhibition to support both storytelling and interaction. The primary objective of the use of these technologies is to make the visit of museums much more engaging, and suitable for different types of visitors. Among the several museums that are moving in this direction, there is the Museo Astronomico di Brera. The museum mainly consists of a corridor, hosting instruments used by astronomers, and the Cupola Schiaparelli, which is an observatory dome. The aim of the research presented in this paper is to develop an interactive Virtual Reality application to be used for improving the users' experience of visits to the Museo Astronomico di Brera. Specifically, the paper presents a VR application to virtually visit the Dome. Preliminary tests have been carried out for evaluating the users' sense of presence in the VR environment. An analysis of the collected data is presented in the paper.

Keywords: Augmented Reality , Museum exhibitions , User Experience , Virtual Reality

Cultural and educational institutions have been subjected to important changes in the approach they use to involve the public in the last years. For example, museums are more and more playing a pedagogical role, referring not only to exhibitions of pieces of art, but also to exhibitions concerning current topics in cultural and social affairs. Storytelling and interaction are two of the most popular methods used to make exhibitions more interesting for the visitors, and many works have demonstrated that Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality technologies can be effectively used to support these approaches in the context of museum exhibitions. This paper presents a research work aimed to design and develop an interactive multisensory AR application (based on sight, hearing, and olfaction senses), which can be used for improving the users' engagement in exhibitions and generate awareness about the dramatic outcomes of pollution on the environment. Specifically, the paper describes a case study of multisensory Augmented Reality interactive experiences concerning the negative effects of human activities on natural environments.

Keywords: Augmented Reality , Multisensory Perception , User Experience

Kandinsky-Experience Book is a multisensory Augmented Reality experience that involves sight, hearing and smell senses and aims at improving the users' engagement in the Kandinsky's artworks. Specifically, the aim of the application is to augment the experience of the user creating a journey throughout Kandinsky's work by using an AR application for smartphones integrated with audio and olfactory stimuli, in order to allow him/her to be more immersed in the piece of art. The research project has been inspired by the synesthetic approach of the abstract painter to the theory and the perception of art in his books. Starting from the artist's considerations about the relationship between different sensorial stimuli in works of art, we decided to amplify some of his theories suggesting a connection between the main pictorial elements and some corresponding olfactory stimuli, grounding our hypotheses on the content of papers concerning the crossmodal synesthetic correspondences between olfactory stimuli and other sensorial modalities. Thanks to the simultaneous presentation of the specifically developed AR contents and the olfactory stimuli, the users' feelings and emotions during the experience are amplified as a result of the sensory integration. Moreover, by using AR technology and olfactory devices to stimulate visual and olfactory perceptual channels we aimed at increasing the generation of longer-lasting memories in the users' mind.

Keywords: Augmented Reality , Cultural Heritage , Multisensory Perception , User Experience

The increasing concern for sustainability-related issues leads to the rise of new fields in design research, dedicated to limit the negative impact of human activities on the environment and society. After addressing issues related to production, efficiency, recyclability and disassembly, designers start to recognize their responsibility in guiding users to behave in a more responsible and sustainable way. For this reason, designing products to support users' behaviour change is becoming one of the most popular trends in design research at the moment. To achieve the desired results design for behaviour change, and in particular, Design for Sustainable Behaviour exploits a variety of approaches. In this Chapter, we explore the use of Design for Sustainable Behaviour techniques through a literature review of theories and case studies. Then, we defined a framework which describes the use of multisensory stimuli as elements to support different phases of interaction during the user experience with an interactive product. We relate this framework to previous works and then we discuss two case studies.

In order to increase safety in the road and improve the user experience in the vehicle, the user studies have been conducted by researchers and practitioners in the automobile industry over the decades. Also, over time, the technology and design inside the car have changed and are leading to a faster, safer, and more comfortable user experience in driving, thanks to the results gained from the user studies. On the other side, the boosting automated driving technology gives new challenges to user studies in the validation of new technologies from the user's perspective, improving the acceptance, employing the right usage, and so on. Laboratory driving simulation becomes one of the main methods for user studies because of its safety, ease of control, and precision in the scene restoration. In this paper, a typical fixed-base driving simulator will be introduced with a user interaction model in order to help the researchers to define the user study scope in each vehicle automation level and even predict the potential user study issues in the future autonomous vehicle technology and scenario. The strategy in the current study is to treat the different levels of automation in vehicles differently. Three case studies are provided accordingly from the low-automated to semi-autonomous driving and eventually fully autonomous driving. Each one addresses some of the critical points that should be paid attention to, in the user studies of the corresponding automation level, applying the previous model. In the low automation condition, the case study showed the effectiveness of the proposed method in the verification of olfactory modality interaction in the driver's attention maintenance. The case study in the semi-automation condition demonstrated the capacity of the current method of capturing the user's behavior changes in the take-over task, which is the most critical scenario in conditional autonomous driving. And the last case study showed the possibility to conduct comfort-related user studies in the full automation condition using the method, by monitoring the cognitive workload of users under different autonomous driving styles.

Keywords: Driving simulation , Driving simulator , User behavior studies , User experience , User studies

Design is inherently affected by human-related factors and it is of no surprise that the fine-Tuning of instruments capable of measuring aspects of human behavior has attracted interest in the design field. The recalled instruments include a variety of devices that capture and quantitatively assess people's unintentional and unconscious reactions and that are generally referred as neurophysiological or biometric. The number of experimental applications of these instruments in design was extremely limited as of 2016, when Lohmeyer and Meboldt published a first report on relevant measures and their interpretation in design. In the last few years, the number of relevant publications has increased dramatically and this determines the opportunity to carry out a comprehensive review in the field. The reviewed contributions are analyzed and classified according to, among others, instruments used, the kind of stakeholders involved and the supported design research activities. The role of biometric measures with respect to traditional research methods is emphasized too. The discussed instruments can represent supports or substitutes for traditional approaches, as well as they are capable of exploring phenomena that could not be addressed hitherto. The intensity of research concerning experiments with biometric measurements is discussed too; a particular focus of the final discussion is the individuation of obstacles that prevent them from becoming commonplace in design research.

Keywords: Biometric versus traditional measures , design cognition , electroencephalography , eye-Tracking , product evaluation

The paper offers insights into people\'s exploration of creative products shown on a computer screen within the overall task of capturing artifacts\' original features and functions. In particular, the study presented here analyzes the effects of different forms of representations, i.e., static pictures and videos. While the relevance of changing stimuli\'s forms of representation is acknowledged in both engineering design and human-computer interaction, scarce attention has been paid to this issue hitherto when creative products are in play. Six creative products have been presented to twenty-eight subjects through either pictures or videos in an Eye-Tracking-supported experiment. The results show that major attention is paid by people to original product features and functional elements when products are displayed by means of videos. This aspect is of paramount importance, as original shapes, parts, or characteristics of creative products might be inconsistent with people\'s habits and cast doubts about their rationale and utility. In this sense, videos seemingly emphasize said original elements and likely lead to their explanation/resolution. Overall, the outcomes of the study strengthen the need to match appropriate forms of representation with different design stages in light of the needs for designs\' evaluation and testing user experience.

Keywords: Areas of interest , Creative products , Eye-Tracking , Human-computer interaction , Images , User experience , Videos

The paper investigates the relationship between the forms through which products are represented and the outcomes of evaluations made by observers. In particular, the study focuses on perceived affordances of creative designs, meant as the capability of capturing original elements and corresponding functions, for products presented through static images or videos. Also thanks to the use of Eye Tracking, the experimental results show how dynamic effects that involve salient aspects of products, as well as creative features, are critical to observers\' capability of capturing design intentions.

Keywords: design affordance , design creativity , design evaluation , forms of representation , product design

In recent years, comfort seat design has received widespread attention from researchers. One of the factors that could contribute to comfort is the thermal influence due to the interaction between the human and the seating surface, for which literature is limited. In this paper, a laboratory experimental setup was used to detect and analyse the temperature changes at interface between seated subjects and a sensorized automotive seat. Acquired temperatures were processed in order to identify a mathematical model for describing the temperature changes at the interface. The main target of the study was the identification of the most sensitive areas of the human body to temperature variation while seated and its effect on local and overall perceived thermal comfort. Statistical analysis showed that the effects of temperature were most perceived in the “Upper Body” (UB) and less in the “Lower Body” (LB). The shoulders, the sides of the back, the back and the buttocks were most sensitive to temperature changes at the interface. Differences have been highlighted also between male and female subjects. Relevance to industry: The identification of the most sensitive areas of the human body to temperature variation, while seated, and the identification of the logarithmic model for describing the temperature changes should allow seat designers to define targets and strategies in developing cooling and heating systems for car seats, taking into account, in a preventive evaluation, the most probable perceived thermal comfort.

Keywords: Comfort evaluation , Seat design , Temperature , Thermal comfort , Thermal sensitivity

Ergonomic design principles can be applied to improve human interaction. In sport activities, ergonomic planning can be a key-point of development both for sportsman behaviour and for sport facilities/devices' design, in order to reduce injuries and muscular-skeletal disease. In some sport activities, wears and shirts plays a role not only as “dress” for sport but also as “containers” for some sports' devices like instruments, chronometers, bottle-holder and so on. In this study, we have focused our attention on long-running people (half-marathon/marathon) that usually use the running T-shirt also as a bottle holder. In this paper, a new prototype of running T-shirt has been realized and compared with the standard one. A comparative ergonomic and comfort assessment has been done. Interaction between human and T-shirt/bottle has been modelled in DELMIA® DHM environment. The video analysis and the acquisition of human joint's angles were processed using the KINOVEA® software. The data were evaluated using the CA_Man® software. Results are related to the subjective ratings expressed by the subject s that filled a questionnaire.

Keywords: Comfort evaluation , Digital human modelling , Ergonomics

In factories of the future, advanced automation systems (e.g., cobots, exoskeletons, cyber physical systems) will reduce the physical effort of workers and compensate their limitations as well as ensure more flexibility, agility, and competitiveness. However, the activities of the operator 4.0 will entail an increased share of complex cognitive tasks. Therefore, monitoring the mental load will be increasingly important to ensure work environments that promote healthy life and wellbeing for all at all ages. For this aim, this paper proposes a framework to analyze heart rate, galvanic skin response and electrooculogram signals in order to extract features able to detect an excessive stress or cognitive load. Two wearable devices are used: Empatica E4 wristband and J!NS MEME electrooculography glasses. The proposed framework has been experimented through a laboratory test focused on LEGO brick-based simulations of manufacturing activities.

Keywords: Electrodermal activity , Electrooculogram , Heart rate , Physiological measurements , Stress monitoring , Wearable sensors

The transition toward smaller lot sizes in production requires the design of highly flexible processes where person and automation systems work together in a synergistic, safe and efficient manner. The new role of the operator requires researchers to study methods and tools able to evaluate the workers performance in order to maximize the comfort and quality of work. The virtual prototyping and simulation systems become fundamental to be able to design adequate production solutions, but before the tools it is necessary to study methods able to represent and consider the characteristics of the operators in the Industry 4.0-oriented factory environment appropriately. In this context, this paper proposes a method to assess the well-being of operators from different perspectives and, consequently, design operator-centered workstations. The first objective is preparatory in order to be able to fine-tune the second one, in a continuous improvement perspective. The approach has been successfully tested in collaboration with a food company.

Keywords: Ergonomics , Human-Centered Manufacturing , Operator 4.0

Although performance measures are strongly used in the field of medical education to evaluate skills of trainees and medical students, the assessment of their cognitive state is relatively “uncommon”. This fact is disadvantageous if we consider the introduction of technologies as physical medical simulators and augmented/virtual reality devices, which may represent an improvement in the students' immersion in the simulated scenario or, conversely, a potential risk of a serious information overload. Therefore, a precise assessment of the cognitive conditions is an essential element of the design process of a medical training session. This study aims to provide the current state in literature on the assessment of cognitive state during medical simulation training sessions. It provides critical insights on the validity and reliability of current metrics and helps in the selection of measurements tools when applied in simulation-based training contexts.

Keywords: Cognitive conditions , Human factors – stress and workload , Medical simulation , Training

An adequate medical education is the key driver of healthcare quality improvement. Technological innovations have led to consistent improvement in learning outcomes but the systematic measurement of students performance and cognitive workload need further research. The aim of this paper is to propose an innovative method for the Design and Development of new advanced learning models, to be used in the training of medical students, which includes also the analysis of students performance and cognitive ergonomics. A web-based survey, on team simulation training and technology role, has been administered to 180 medical students. On the basis of this analysis, a list of guidelines for the design of medical education training has been proposed.

Keywords: Advanced learning technologies - cognitive ergonomics , Augmented reality , Instructional design , Medical simulations , Mental workload , Training