# Presentation: 259909

## Human-Centered Systems

**Background**
- People play a critical role in the safety, reliability and performance of NASA systems.  Their creativity, adaptability and problem-solving capabilities are key to resilient operations across the gamut of aeronautics and space exploration.  In space, future manned missions face the challenge of ensuring safe and effective human performance in hostile environments for prolonged periods of time.  In aviation, people are the backbone of a national aviation system that is straining to meet the needs of growing consumer demands.
- Human error has been estimated to account for 70-80% of aviation accidents.  While individual human error is important, accident analyses (both in aeronautics and space operations) also implicate a complex interaction of management and cultural practices, team and organizational structures, communication processes, automation, documentation, and training.  Hence, research must be directed at understanding a broad spectrum of roles and activities at NASA.
- Advances in computing power, automation, and communications have the potential to dramatically improve the performance of NASA systems.  However, new technology often increases the complexity of systems, making it a challenge to ensure that people can understand these systems and use them properly.
- Human-centered design addresses this challenge by first understanding how people work, think, collaborate with each other, and interact with their work environment.  The next step is to use this understanding to mold technology into useful human tools.  Good human-centered design accomplishes this goal by building on human strengths in perception, creativity, adaptability and problem-solving, while mitigating the negative impact of human limitations in vigilance, memory, and multi-tasking.

**Research Overview**
- Research on human-centered systems is a multi-disciplinary effort with contributions from psychology, sociology, physiology, industrial engineering, anthropology, communication, and computer science.
- NASA Ames is internationally recognized for its behavioral and neurophysiological research on fundamental human performance, team communication, social relationships, and organizational factors.  Ames has been a leader in the development of computational models of visual perception, attention, cognition, task performance, organizational factors, and human-system interactions. New computational methods for modeling human behavior are being used to support technology infusion in space and aviation.

***NASA Ames Research Center  •  2004***

- People play a critical role in all NASA systems, serving as pilots, scientists, engineers, astronauts, ground controllers, planners, maintenance workers, and analysts.  Human-centered systems research is directed at understanding how people work, in order to improve complex human-machine systems, and to develop new technologies that amplify people’s strengths.

## Human-Centered Systems

**Human-Centered Systems**

- Ames researchers have developed innovative, non-intrusive approaches to assess human performance, such as new technologies for eye, gaze, and head tracking in virtual environments.  Pioneering studies of workload have led to the development of what is now the de facto, standard subjective rating scale used worldwide. Ames has also maintained leadership in the study of fatigue, spatial disorientation, and perceptual adaptation in microgravity environments.
- Research on team and organizational practices includes experimental and field studies of risk perception and cross-cultural issues in team decision making. It also includes ethnographic studies and multi-agent computational models of work systems. These approaches have produced critical insights about circumstantial interactions of people, tools, and organizations that cause breakdowns in distributed cognitive systems.
- Ames has also been a key player in the development of new technologies to support Human-Centered System Design, including pioneering work on virtual reality and spatial audio technologies.  Research into human vision has led to the development of widely-adopted standards for text legibility, image quality, and new techniques for optimizing image compression.  New concepts have been developed for flight deck displays, air-ground automation, and architectures for distributed multi-agent systems.
- Recently developed standards for flight-crew training and procedure design have had an immense impact on the aviation industry and have translated well to the Space Shuttle and other NASA space missions.  Specific advances include new techniques for crew debriefing streamlining documents and procedures, improving air-ground communications, and other elements of crew resource management.  To promote aviation safety, Ames leads an effort to systematicaly identify precursors to accidents and incidents through a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches.

- Ames also leads NASA in comprehensive work system design.  The focus of this interdisciplinary research is on “design in the context of use”, which begins with a thorough understanding of the work context and how people behave in that context, rather than working backwards from idealized functions to be automated. A critical feature of this work is that it actively involves workers in technology development, with the goal of developing an information system that supports the efforts of human experts to deal with changing and uncertain situations.
- Research on work system design has led to comprehensive improvements in operations for the Mars Exploration Rover.  This research has systematically related the design of facilities (such as room layout), group processes (such as communication and meeting management), and automation (such as work flow technologies) to facilitate collaboration and team situation-awareness.
**Benefits**
- People play a critical role in virtually all NASA systems, both in aeronautics and space.  The future successes of NASA missions requires that these complex systems be designed for human use rather than engineering convenience.  Starting from a sound scientific foundation, Ames is developing technologies, facilities, standards, guidelines, and procedures critical to achieving this success.
**Points of Contact:**
- Patricia M. Jones
- (650) 604-1345; Patricia.M.Jones@nasa.gov
- http://humanfactors.arc.nasa.gov/
- William J. Clancey
- (650) 604-2526; William.J.Clancey@nasa.gov
- http://ic.arc.nasa.gov/tech/group.php?gid=15&ta=3