Thursday, August 30, 2012
Blogging on Division 21 talks from the 2012 American Psychological Association Annual Meeting: IED Detection
Thursday, August 23, 2012
Can Technology Come to the Rescue of the Distracted Driver?
In my
previous post, I discussed how technology can be a bane to a driver. In this
post, I discuss how technology can help the distracted driver.
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration,
cell phones are responsible for 18% of fatalities in distraction-related
crashes. Hence, it is important to reduce distractions caused by cell phones. This article in Ergonomics in Design
by Dr. Linda Angell, a Research Scientist at the Virginia Tech
Transportation Institute, discusses various software applications
that can be used to reduce driver distractions associated with cell phone use.
These applications vary with respect to what they do.
Drivesafe.ly is
a software application that reads out texts and emails to drivers, without
drivers having to touch their cell phones. Dial2do is
a similar software application that allows drivers to listen to and send texts
and emails, tweets etc. The perceived advantage of these apps is that these are
hands-free. This reminded me of Henry Thoreau’s quote “It’s not what you look at
that matters, it’s what you see”. These applications certainly facilitate
“looking” but may fail to promote “seeing” because drivers are still using their
cognitive resources to think about the world outside of the driving environment
via the texts and emails. Therefore, though these apps may not necessarily help
with cognitive distractions (because drivers are still listening to and
comprehending texts and emails while driving), it is one step in the right
direction – which is, helping drivers keep their hands in the steering wheel
and their eyes on the road.
Zoomsafer is
an application that can be downloaded onto your phone and provides
auto-replies to incoming texts and calls stating that the driver is driving and
is unable to receive calls and texts. TrinityNoble’s
Guardian Angel MP is another application that locks the cell phone when the car
is traveling above a certain speed limit, thereby disallowing any cell phone
usage.
These applications can be used by a conscientious driver to
parents wanting to enforce ‘no-texting while driving’ on their children to
companies wanting to avoid lawsuits that arise due to motor accidents involving
use of cell phones.
Photo credit: Edbrown05 via Wikimedia Commons.
Monday, August 20, 2012
Technology and the Distracted Driver
Mr.
Mouhamad Naboulsi’s recent post in the Cognitive Engineering and Decision
Making group on Linkedin bought my attention to this article. Roximity and Ford have partnered to make an app that would be available in
cars that bring location-based deal alerts to drivers. The information from the
app in your smartphone will be displayed on Ford’s dashboard. You can find more
information on this here.
Granted the app might be fantastic in finding eye-popping deals on
gas, restaurants, and department stores, the question here is why should this
information be relayed to people while they are driving? According to a 2009 report by the National Highway Traffic
Safety Administration, 5,474 people were killed and an additional of 448,000
were injured in motor vehicle crashes in the United States as a result of
distracted driving. So do we need any more distractions on the road?
Photo credit: The Library of Congress via Flickr.
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
Live Agents
A month back, I was travelling outside the United
States and attempted to buy credit to place internet calls, to connect with my
family. I entered my payment information and received a message stating that “We
were unable to process your request. Try again later”. I repeated this 5 times (because I kept receiving this message) only to find out that I have been charged 5 items. However, I was able to chat
with a live agent and get this issue resolved in no time.
Now, this is not the first time I have chatted with
a live agent to help me with my queries. I have used this feature for shopping
enquiries to billing enquiries.
Chatting is so much more hassle-free in
comparison to waiting for an agent on the phone. Advantages of getting support
from live agents over telephone support include:
- It is faster.
- It does not disrupt customers’ workflow. That is, chatting with a live agent can be easily done in conjunction with other tasks and do not require the extra step of placing a phone call. This really fits the model of today’s technology users who are trying to accomplish multiple things with their computer.
One of the enhancements that I would desire as a
customer is more feedback as to what the live agent is doing. Though the live
agents ask you to wait while they are investigating the issue or query, better
indicators as to how long this process would take would be beneficial. These
status indicators could be automated and can be easily integrated with the chat
engine. This way, the customer knows how long the process would take and what
the chat agent is doing.
I also wonder about the usage statistics on live chat
agents and whether this appeals only to certain demographics of the user population.
For example, older adults may prefer having a conversation on the phone versus
chatting on the computer.
Photo credit: David Vignoni via Wikimedia Commons.
Monday, August 13, 2012
Human Factors and Ergonomics in India
The BRIC
nations (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) are projected to be the world’s
largest and most influential countries by 2050. Undoubtedly, as these countries
undergo advancements, several domains/industries would benefit from the application of human
factors and ergonomics principles.
Agriculture has been the backbone of Indian economy and hence
it was not surprising when I came across a paper written by Saran in 1968, which
discussed the design of a grain harvester for agricultural work in India.
Rather than imposing a design that required altering the working position and
habits of the Indian farmer, a design that incorporated the habits and usage
patterns of the Indian farmer are described in this paper.
Nearly four decades after Saran published his paper, Mukhopadhyay (2006)
describes the state of ergonomics in India. He discusses how ergonomics
can be applied to various industries such as:
- Crafts (e.g., pottery making, jewellery making)
- Agricultural tasks (e.g., harvesting, sowing)
- Non-motorized transportation (e.g., rickshaws)
Mukhopadhyay discusses how successful ergonomic
interventions in India would require raising awareness about ergonomics to the
rural people.
How can we forget India’s IT sector? The operators working
long shifts in the call centers to the software developers working on projects outsourced from other countries, the Indian IT industry would benefit from various human factors and
ergonomic interventions.
Last but not the least,
increasing consumerism in India also offers a plethora of opportunities for
human factors and ergonomics research, that would take into account the unique needs of this market.
Wednesday, August 8, 2012
Blogging on Division 21 talks from the American Psychological Association Annual Meeting – Use of Smart Phone Apps as Health Interventions
Dr. David
Gustafson from the University of Wisconsin-Madison discussed how mobile
phone apps can be used to help recovering alcoholics from relapsing by using virtual communities.
The
advantages of the application include:
- Use of GPS to detect whether the user
is near a high risk location such as a liquor store and allow the user to
get support. Specifically, a screen with options to call or text a friend
comes up when the user is near a high risk location.
- Capability to chat with individuals
with addiction problems thereby gaining peer support.
- Distance counseling via video chat.
- Capability to complete weekly surveys:
this information is used by the computer intelligence to detect relapses.
Photo
credit: James Whatley via Wikimedia Commons.
Tuesday, August 7, 2012
Blogging on Division 21 talks from the 2012 American Psychological Association Annual Meeting: Technology and healthcare
Dr. Daniel Morrow from
the University of Illinois discussed how technology can be used to improve the
collaboration between health care providers and diabetes patients as well as to
improve patients’ adherence to medications. The highlights from his talk are
described below:
- U.S. healthcare system assumes patients to be active, aware, and health literate.
- Older adults with diabetes take an average of 4-5 medications per day.
- Self-care imposes a lot of cognitive demands on the elderly. Think of the working memory demands associated with having to keep track of when each medication need to be taken.
- Non-adherence to medications and inadequate plan for taking medications are problems. Nearly 30% of hospitalizations are linked to non-adherence.
- Communication from health care providers is inadequate – often times, information provided to the elderly patients are poorly organized with no check as to whether the patients were able to accurately comprehend the information that was transmitted to them.
- It is therefore important to reduce the cognitive load on the elderly patients and help them collaborate easily with their providers to plan their medication routine.
Dr. Morrow discussed the
design of an EMR-based system called the Medtable to aid the elderly
population. This system has 3 interfaces: a set up interface that would allow
clinicians to set up patients’ medication list, a collaboration interface that
would allow clinicians to reconcile medication information with patients and
educate patients on the times they need to take medications, and finally a
print-out interface that allows clinicians to provide a printout of the medication
scheduling information to patients to take home. This system is under clinical
investigation currently and the expectation is that this would improve patient
outcomes by improving the collaboration between patients and health care
providers and reducing the cognitive demand on the patients.
Photo credit: Ernes via Wikimedia
Commons.
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