Situation awareness

About: Situation awareness is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 7380 publications have been published within this topic receiving 108695 citations. The topic is also known as: SA & situational awareness.

The influence of agent reliability on trust in human-agent collaboration

Abstract: Motivation - To investigate ways to support human-automation teams with real-world, imperfect automation where many system failures are the result of systematic failure.Research approach - An experimental approach was used to investigate how variance in agent reliability may influence human's trust and subsequent reliance on agent's decision aids. Sixty command and control (C2) teams, each consisting of a human operator and two cognitive agents, were asked to detect and respond to battlefield threats in six ten-minute scenarios. At the end of each scenario, participants completed the SAGAT queries, followed by the NASA TLX queries.Findings/Design - Results revealed that teams with experienced human operators accepted significantly less inappropriate recommendations from agents than teams with inexperienced operators. More importantly, the knowledge of agent's reliability and the ratio of unreliable tasks have significant effects on human's trust, as manifested in both team performance and human operators' rectification of inappropriate recommendations from agents.Originality/Value - It represents an important step toward uncovering the nature of human trust in human-agent collaboration.Take away message - This research has shown that given even minimal basis for understanding when the operator should and should not trust the agent recommendations allows operators to make better AUDs, to have better situation awareness on the critical issues associated with automation error, and to establish better trust in intelligent agents.

Situation awareness catches on: what? so what? now what?

Abstract: Human factors/ergonomics professionals regularly study the situation awareness (SA) problems of pilots, air traffic controllers, automobile drivers, power plant workers, ambulance dispatchers, urban search and rescue professionals, and unmanned vehicle operators, to mention a few. The challenge has been to define SA operationally and devise measurement strategies that focus on attention and recall on the one hand and relevant actions on the other. Although there have been many successes, challenges remain. This review is organized in three parts. Under "What?" we discuss definitions of SA, their interpretations in terms of human information processing and ecological psychological theories, as well as techniques for measuring SA. Under "So what?" we introduce SA applications'information requirements, technological tools, and training systems'that support the way people work and live. Finally, under "Now what?" we discuss future directions for SA research. Keywords: Driver distraction; Language: en

Warfighter Physiological and Environmental Monitoring: A Study for the U.S. Army Research Institute in Environmental Medicine and the Soldier Systems Center

Abstract: : An unprecedented opportunity exists to introduce real-time physiological and environmental monitoring technology into future US Army dismounted forces for use in both training and combat situations. The motivation is to enhance the survivability of the individual warfighter and to provide increased situational awareness to both combat medics and commanders during the course of a mission or field operation. The monitoring technology must be reliable, must be unobtrusive, and compelling in terms of value to both the lowest-echelon warfighters and their command chain. Realizing these objectives will require adapting and extending ambulatory medical monitoring technology well beyond the capabilities of current commercial devices and systems, and will place the US Army in a unique position with regard to real-time physiological status and health monitoring. This report identifies specific technology and system level issues that must be addressed to realize the objective system and proposes both a near-term and far-term system concept and development strategy. Technology developments critical to success include covert wireless personal area networking, physiological and environmental sensors hardened for the dynamic warfighter environment, and real-time data processing and fusion algorithms to extract the relevant physiological information and overall health status.

Considering Etiquette in the Design of an Adaptive System

Abstract: In this article, the authors empirically assess the costs and benefits of designing an adaptive system to follow social conventions regarding the appropriateness of interruptions. Interruption management is one area within the larger topic of automation etiquette. The authors tested these concepts in an outdoor environment using the Communications Scheduler, a wearable adaptive system that classifies users' cognitive state via brain and heart sensors and adapts its interactions. Designed to help dismounted soldiers, it manages communications in much the same way as a good administrative assistant. Depending on a combination of message priority, user workload, and system state, it decides whether to interrupt the user's current tasks. The system supports decision makers in two innovative ways: It reliably measures a mobile user's cognitive workload to adapt its behavior, and it implements rules of etiquette adapted from human-human interactions to improve human- computer interactions. Results indicate costs and benefits to both interrupting and refraining from interrupting. When users were overloaded, primary task performance was improved by managing interruptions. However, overall situation awareness on secondary tasks suffered. This work empirically quantifies costs and benefits of "appropriate" interruption behaviors, demonstrating the value of designing adaptive agents that follow social conventions for interactions with humans.