Human factors and ergonomics

Every year approximately more than one million people die on world's road. Human factors are the largest contributing factors to the traffic crashes and fatality, and recent researches have identified drivers' cognitive aspect as the major cause of human errors in 80% of crash events. Thus, the development of countermeasures to manage drivers' cognitive aspect is an important challenge to address. Driver-Assistance Systems have been developed and integrated into vehicles to acquire data about the environment and the driver, and to communicate information to the driver, usually via the senses of vision and hearing. Unfortunately, these senses are already subjected to high demands, and the visual and auditory stimuli can be underestimate or considered as annoying. However, other sensory channels could be used to elicit the drivers' cognitive aspect. In particular, smell can impact on various aspects of humans' psychological state, such as people's attention level, and can induce activation states in people. The research presented in this paper aims at investigating whether olfactory stimuli, instead of auditory ones, can be used to influence the cognitive aspect of the drivers. For this purpose, an experimental framework has been set up and experimental testing sessions have been performed. The experimental framework is a multisensory environment consisting of an active stereo-projector and a screen used for displaying a video that reproduces a very monotonous car trip, a seating-buck for simulating the car environment, a wearable Olfactory Display, in-ear earphones and the BioGraph Infiniti system for acquiring the subjects' physiological data. The analysis of the data collected in the testing sessions shows that, in comparison to the relaxation state, olfactory stimuli are effective in increasing subjects' attention level more than the auditory ones.

Product designers are more and more addressing the design of product experience, in addition to the more traditional product design, where the focus of the design practice is on the interaction between the product and its users. Traditional methods and tools used so far for the design of products are not suitable to the design of experience. Among the emerging methods, experience prototyping seems effective and well addressing the new requirements of experience design. The paper describes the emerging technologies enabling experience prototyping, and provides some examples where this new methodology for experience design has been applied.

This paper describes the implementation of a Multimodal Guidance System (MGS) for upper limb rehabilitation through vision, haptic and sound. The system consists of a haptic device that physically renders virtual path of 2D shapes through the point-based approach, while sound technology provides audio feedback inputs about patient's actions while performing a manual task as for example: starting and/or finishing an sketch; different sounds related to the hand's velocity while sketching. The goal of this sonification approach is to strengthen the patient's understanding of the virtual shape which is used in the rehabilitation process, and to inform the patient about some attributes that could otherwise remain unseen. Our results provide conclusive evidence that the effect of using the sound as additional feedback increases the accuracy in the tasks operations.

Keywords: Haptic guidance , Sound interaction , Upper-limb rehabilitation

The application of ergonomic principles to the design of processes, workplace and organization, is not only a way to respond to legal requirements, but also an indispensable premise for any company that wants to pursue a business logic. One of the most stressful works, in terms of prolonged wrong postures and psych-cognitive effort, is the dentist's one. This paper shows a cheap and effective method to acquire workplaces, work-cycles and workers-postures, in a workenvironment (Dental clinic), in order to analyze how dentists (workers) move themselves into the work environment around the workstations (Dental clinic seat), with their own tools and devices, and do their jobs. The aim of the analysis is to determine the best way to plan the movement of the workers and their work-cycle in order to optimize the productivity and to obtain the best ergonomic rating for the workers. For those purposes, authors used Virtual Prototyping techniques and OCRA Analysis for making the biomechanical risk assessment; time acquisition and video acquisition has been made to analyze the work cycle. DELMIA® software was used to model the workstation and for modelling activities and postures associated with various repetitive actions; pictures taken by cameras have been processed through the KINOVEA® software and simulations have been made for the own worker percentile. An ergonomic/comfort driven redesign of the work-cycle has been suggested in order to optimize the work cycle in terms of risk minimization. The application has been made on the typical working day of an Italian dentist.

Keywords: Comfort evaluation , Dentist's work , Digital human modeling , Ergonomics , Not-invasive postural analysis

The application of ergonomic principles to the design of processes, workplace and organization, is not only a way to respond to legal requirements, but also an indispensable premise for any company that wants to pursue a business logic. This paper shows a cheap and effective method to acquire workplaces, work-cycles and workers-postures, in a work-environment, in order to analyze how workers move themselves into the work environment around the workstations, with their own tools and devices, and do their jobs. The aim of the analysis is to determine the best way to plan the movement of the workers and their work-cycle in order to optimize the productivity and to obtain the best ergonomic rating for the workers. For those purposes, authors used Virtual Prototyping techniques and OCRA Analysis for making the biomechanical risk assessment; time acquisition and video acquisition has been made to analyze the work cycle. DELMIA® software was used to model the workstation and for modelling activities and postures associated with various repetitive actions; pictures taken by cameras have been processed through the KINOVEA® software and simulations have been made for the own worker percentile. If needed, an ergonomic/comfort driven redesign of the work-environment has been suggested in order to optimize the work cycle in terms of risk minimization. The application has been made on the lunch-boxes' distribution station's workers at University of Salerno (Italy).

Keywords: Comfort evaluation , Digital human modeling , Ergonomics , Not-invasive postural analysis , Redesign

The application of ergonomic principles to the design of processes, workplace and organization, is not only a way to respond to legal requirements, but also an indispensable premise for any company that wants to pursue a business logic. This paper shows a cheap and effective method to acquire workplaces, work-cycles and workers-postures, in a work-environment, in order to analyze how workers move them-selves into the work environment around the workstations, with their own tools and devices, and do their jobs. The aim of the analysis is to determine the best way to plan the movement of the workers and their work-cycle in order to optimize the productivity and to obtain the best ergonomic rating for the workers. For those purposes, authors used Virtual Prototyping techniques and OCRA Analysis for making the biomechanical risk assessment; time acquisition and video acquisition has been made to analyze the work cycle. DELMIA® software was used to model the workstation and for modelling activities and postures associated with various repetitive actions; pictures taken by cameras have been processed through the KINOVEA® software and simulations have been made for the own worker percentile. If needed, an ergonomic/comfort driven redesign of the work-environment has been suggested in order to optimize the work cycle in terms of risk minimization. The application has been made on the University of Salerno's Pizzeria's workers.

Keywords: Comfort evaluation , Digital human modeling , Ergonomics , Postural analysis , Redesign

The application of ergonomic principles to the design of processes, workplace and organization, is not only a way to respond to legal requirements, but also an indispensable premise for any company that wants to pursue a business logic. This paper shows a cheap and effective method to acquire workplaces, work-cycles and workers-postures, in a work-environment, in order to analyze how workers move themselves into the work environment around the workstations, with their own tools and devices, and do their jobs. The aim of the analysis is to determine the best way to plan the movement of the workers and their work-cycle in order to optimize the productivity and to obtain the best ergonomic rating for the workers. For those purposes, authors used Virtual Prototyping techniques and OCRA Analysis for making the biomechanical risk assessment; time acquisition and video acquisition has been made to analyze the work cycle. DELMIA® software was used to model the workstation and for modelling activities and postures associated with various repetitive actions; pictures taken by cameras have been processed through the KINOVEA® software and simulations have been made for the own worker percentile. If needed, an ergonomic/comfort driven redesign of the work-environment has been suggested in order to optimize the work cycle in terms of risk minimization. The application has been made on the lunch payment station's workers at University of Salerno (Italy).

Keywords: Comfort evaluation , Digital human modeling , Ergonomics , Noninvasive postural analysis , Redesign

The evaluation of perceived comfort inside a car during the early stages of the design process is still an open issue. Modern technologies like CAE (Computer Aided Engineering) and DHM (Digital Human Modeling) already offer several tools for a preventive evaluation of ergonomic parameters for car drivers using detailed CAD (Computer Aided Design) models of car interiors and by a MBS (multi-body-system) solver for evaluating movements and interactions. Such evaluations are, nonetheless, not sufficient because the subjectivity of comfort perception is due to factors that are very difficult to evaluate in the early stage of design. Physical prototypes are needed and these are often too expensive to be realized. In the last 30 years, several researchers have tried to develop methods to objectivize comfort performance but most of these methods are based on questionnaires, market research, or physiological and biomechanical analyses, and need devices or interactions that modify perceived comfort. Recently, the authors of this study developed a software tool named CaMAN® for postural comfort evaluations of upper limbs. The software employs a static analysis of human joints in a working environment (the car cockpit is assumed to be a working environment). Some software, like AnyBody™, allows evaluations of the muscular efforts made during body actions. In the literature, it is possible to find several papers such as Na et al. [26] and Telfer et al. [40] that demonstrate a correlation between muscular effort and perceived comfort. Empirical evidence suggests that better comfort is related to lower muscular activity. This paper shows the results obtained from numerical and experimental analyses using AnyBody™ and CaMAN®. Simulations of the static and dynamic behaviors of a car driver using a steering wheel are performed. The results show the differences between preventive analyses of perceived comfort that are made with and without an applied load for a subject in the fiftieth percentile. This paper shows the results obtained from numerical and experimental analyses using AnyBody™ and CaMAN®. Simulations of the static and dynamic behaviors of a car driver using a steering wheel are performed. The results show the differences between preventive analyses of perceived comfort that are made with and without an applied load for a subject in the fiftieth percentile.

This paper describes a handheld application to help pilots when entering degraded visibility conditions. In this case, the loss of control is a typical emergency situation from which a pilot should be able to recover, but often he/she doesn't do owing to problems of situation awareness. A new instrument, based on the use of accelerometers/GPS equipping modern handheld devices has been designed, virtually tested in flight simulators and finally tested in flight. Attention has been given to show essential information in a very simple and intuitive way, so that the instrument can be useful in case of pilot disorientation, panic or high stress levels. After a testing phase, the instrument showed useful to provide an indication about the attitude of the plane and to provide the pilot an indication of the stick and throttle movements needed to restore a safe levelled flight. The use of this application by pilots in emergency situation can enhance the survivability in Instrument Meteorological Conditions also without a specific training. This paper shows how the high computation capability and advanced visualization devices typical of smartphones can be useful to increase the flight safety by developing a new class of emergency not-certified instruments. A further testing phase of the instrument in critical conditions like gusty environment or deteriorated weather will be carried out as a future development of this work to better evaluate the limits of the instrument herein described.

Keywords: Flight safety , Flight simulation , Human machine interfaces , IMC , VMC

The SESAR (Single European Sky Air Traffic Management Research) Joint Undertaking has recently granted the Resilient Synthetic Vision for Advanced Control Tower Air Navigation Service Provision project within the framework of the H2020 research on High Performing Airport Operations. Hereafter, we describe the project motivations, the objectives, the proposed methodology and the expected impacts, i.e. the consequences of using virtual/augmented reality technologies in the control tower.

Keywords: Air Traffic Control , Airport tower , Synthetic vision , Virtual/augmented Reality

The present paper proposes a new adaptive smart kitchen environment able to support different users with several typologies of impairment (i.e., visual, motor, cognitive) in performing cooking activities. This system is managed through an adaptive user interface, which guides the user in food preparation according to users' capabilities and needs and permits household appliances controlling. Results of a preliminary usability evaluation has shown that the proposed solution is accessible and highly usable for users with some limitations such elderly with mild to moderate dementia and adult people with moderate retinopathy and rheumatoid arthritis.

Keywords: Adaptive User Interface , Design for all , Human Computer Interaction , Smart Environment

Designing sustainable systems is challenging since economic, environmental and social factors must be considered. It is particularly hard when heavy interaction with humans take place. The smart home is an example: it is finalized to increase the comfort of dwellings and optimize the devices' behaviour as well as the consumed resources in relation to the users' habits. Elderly represent a special category of users characterized by specific needs: therefore, the design of a smart home is particularly critical since elderly require support in their everyday activities, control of their own lifestyle monitoring, and consciousness about the devices' behaviours. As a consequence, smart home are usually complicated, expensive and not suitable for elderly. This paper defines a methodology to design sustainable smart home systems for elderly. An intelligent network monitoring the users' wellbeing and assuring a controlled use of objects and resources is defined and verified on a case study.

Keywords: Assistive technologies , Distributed information management , Smart home , Smart objects , Sustainability

Search engine efficiency is an essential prerequisite to ensure a satisfactory on-line purchasing experience. Despite powerful tools available today, search engine is limited to a semantic elaboration of keywords and they do not allow users finding product categories that do not belong to their knowledge sphere. In this context, in order to make an effective search engine it is necessary to provide tools able to understand what the user is looking for and suggest the products that best satisfy their needs, regardless of users' background. To this aim, this paper proposes an innovative smart search strategy, based on artificial intelligence technologies. In order to highlight the system potential, the smart object market case study has been considered. The SOs market is grown so quickly to disorient the average user and it offer a wide variety of products apparently similar, but that are characterized by different features that the average user fails to perceive.

Keywords: Adaptive systems , Internet of Things , Product evaluation , Search dngine

A product is chosen by users not only for the features it offers but also for the perceived experience of use. This statement widely recognized in literature highlight that key issues for the success of interactive products are the practical, experiential, affective, meaningful and valuable aspects of interaction. In the last years, gesture-based interfaces have been introduced to make the experience of interaction more emotional, intuitive and natural. For this reason, the design and development of products integrated gesture-based interfaces represent a challenging issue. In this context, a User-Centered Design (UCD) method to implement novel interaction paradigms into traditional consumer products is proposed. Its application in a real case study addresses the development and prototyping of a system exploiting gesture-based interaction to train aspiring conductors of orchestra. If a young musician wants to play a guitar, it is usually no great problem to find one, but if a musician wants to learn the ins and outs of being a conductor, the problem shifts to search for an electronic device managed by hands as used by conductors. The developed system provides three main functionalities: tempo control, velocity control and instruments activation. It represents both a use case to validate the proposed UCD method and an innovative solution in the context of aspiring conductor's training.

Smart Objects (SOs) market offers a wide variety of products apparently similar but characterized by different features that the average users fail to perceive. Consequently, their purchasing is often based on price and brand affection. In this context, users need a tool able to guide them in choosing the most suitable object to satisfy their expectations. To this purpose, this paper proposes a new systematic method to assess SOs in a comprehensive way: it allows to objectively assess and compare products and provides evaluation results tailored on users' needs. A first validation is carried out on three different SO typologies.

Keywords: Internet of Things , Smart objects , Systematic evaluation process , Usability

The present study proposes a new method to manage adaptation behaviour of adaptive system according to the output information provide by a user model based on Bayesian Belief Network (BBN). Such method has been applied in the development of smart interfaces for cooking and kitchen management, such as meal preparation and interaction with the major kitchen appliances, pandering the user's skills, expertise and disabilities. Nevertheless, this method is flexible and suitable enough to be used in other application contexts. The validity of the decision making algorithm has been tested through simulation of real user case scenarios.

Keywords: Adaptive Interface , Bayesian Network , Decision making algorithm , Smart Home

Nowadays to design a product able to adapt to end-users with different needs and abilities it is necessary to manage a multitude of information coming from the analysis of different context of use. This means that we have to handle parallel and interdependent UCD multiple process. This research aims to define a methodology, which may apply this philosophy into design practice. In particular, it aims to provide tools to summarize the information needed to analyze user characteristics and needs, allows the designer to extrapolate the user's needs and support the selection of prototype technologies suitable to the user categories.

Keywords: Universal design , User centered design

In recent years, Human Robot Cooperation (HRC) has found an increasing adoption in manufacturing, especially to help humans in the execution of manual assembly tasks. An effective employment of HRC encompasses human relief from exhausting operations. Therefore, the design of cooperative solutions should be developed accordingly to ergonomic aspects. The present work proposes an approach to support the integration of ergonomic evaluation of manual operations in the design of HRC solution, based on modelling and simulation of the human body along the manufacturing tasks. The proposed modified model integrates the ergonomic metrics and returns a fatigue level along the working shift scheduling. A real manual assembly of biomedical products has been selected to validate the proposed approach. As a result, the suggested fatigue model provides an objective ergonomic evaluation of manual operations which verifies the impact of the HRC solution on the production goals.

Keywords: Biomedical , Ergonomic evaluation , Human Robot Cooperation , Simulation

What is User Experience (UX) and how does it relate to Usability? The understanding of the mutual relationship between UX and product usability has a strong impact on product design methodologies and on the design outcomes' success. This paper aims to investigate such relationship thanks to a set of experiments around the design of interactive products without demanding completeness of findings.