June 21st, 10am EST
Recap:
How HFES Knowledge Can Unlock Remote Control Potential – Understanding Motion Sickness and Fostering Situation Awareness – by Ellemieke van Doorn
In recent years there has been a significant trend across various domains shifting from local to remote control. Remote control has advantages, such as increased efficiency or safer working environments for operators. Remote control can especially be interesting when it allows operators to quickly switch between controlled objects, or remotely locate patients, without the need to travel between different areas. Since it does not require an operator to be on-site, remote control can reduce the logistical impact of disruptions from autonomous operating systems. Additionally, it allows for operation in hazardous or remote locations without exposing individuals to potential risks. Remote control, however, significantly changes the operator’s role and introduces new human-machine interactions. Although executed tasks may stay the same, remote control commonly changes how operators receive visual, auditive, and tactile cues. It introduces remote workplaces for the operator and new technical components such as cameras, sensors, and information elements that require monitoring. Consequently, the way people acquire situation awareness is changed. For example, from practical experience, we know that it is often more difficult for people to estimate distance or speed based on camera images compared to direct vision, and these estimates are influenced by the choice of camera type and lenses. People in local settings can also use auditory and tactile information that is not explicitly designed for the task but does provide them with information on the basis of which situations can be assessed; think of auditory and tactile information that helps a driver notice slipperiness on the road or defects in the vehicle. The poverty of visual, auditory, and tactile information and latency in remote control can lead to a mismatch in the perception of movement and thus induce symptoms of motion sickness.
Considering the above, remote control is a topic that raises several human factors and ergonomics questions that our community can help to answer. To stimulate knowledge exchange and discussions among peers, the Performance and Perception Technical Group hosted a webinar on remote control systems on June 21st: How HFES Knowledge can Unlock Remote Control Potential – Understanding Motion Sickness and Fostering Situation Awareness. The webinar is now available online.Our first speaker, Dr. Kay Stanney, provided an overview of motion sickness knowledge gained from years of research in the areas of VR and AR. She explained how VR and AR result in different motion sickness symptoms and also differ in the extent to which negative effects continue to influence people after leaving the VR or AR environment. In the webinar, we discussed the similarities between VR, AR, and remote control and what measures can help to reduce motion sickness risks. Our second speaker, Dr. Alan Hobbs, presented a practical case of remote control. He discussed human factors issues that are addressed in the aim to operate Remotely Piloted Aircraft routinely and safely in civilian airspace. He addressed several cases where issues have occurred and human factors knowledge was required to prevent human error. Professor Szonya Durant, as third speaker, gave insight into the extensive research that she and her colleagues have done in the field of autonomous vehicles. She discussed why remote control is relevant in the field of autonomous vehicles and what issues are faced by remote operators. She addressed the importance of situation awareness and discussed how the study of situation awareness provided insights on designs to help to improve operators’ situation awareness.
Considering the above, remote control is a topic that raises several human factors and ergonomics questions that our community can help to answer. It is a topic that is of relevance for multiple technical groups, that can profit from knowledge exchange between technical groups, and where HFES can help translate our knowledge to practitioners in different domains – from surface transportation to aviation, from healthcare to process control, and beyond. To stimulate this, the Performance and Perception Technical Group of HFES is hosting a webinar on remote control systems. This webinar will focus on the challenges that operators of remote systems face such as motion sickness and situation awareness, culminating in a discussion of the research and regulation needs in this domain. I invite you all to take this opportunity to learn from our speakers and, above all, to contribute your own knowledge and questions.