Catherine M. Burns

There Is More to Monitoring a Nuclear Power Plant than Meets the Eye

A fundamental challenge in studying cognitive systems in context is how to move from the specific work setting studied to a more general understanding of distributed cognitive work and how to support it. We present a series of cognitive field studies that illustrate one response to this challenge. Our focus was on how nuclear power plant (NPP) operators monitor plant state during normal operating conditions. We studied operators at two NPPs with different control room interfaces. We identified strong consistencies with respect to factors that made monitoring difficult and the strategies that operators have developed to facilitate monitoring. We found that what makes monitoring difficult is not the need to identify subtle abnormal indications against a quiescent background, but rather the need to identify and pursue relevant findings against a noisy background. Operators devised proactive strategies to make important information more salient or reduce meaningless change, create new information, and off-load some cognitive processing onto the interface. These findings emphasize the active problem-solving nature of monitoring, and highlight the use of strategies for knowledge-driven monitoring and the proactive adaptation of the interface to support monitoring. Potential applications of this research include control room design for process control and alarm systems and user interfaces for complex systems.

Evaluation of Ecological Interface Design for Nuclear Process Control: Situation Awareness Effects

Objective: We determine whether an ecological interface display for nuclear power plant operations supports improved situation awareness over traditional and user-centered displays in a realistic environment. Background: Ecological interface design (EID) has not yet been fully evaluated with real operators facing realistic scenarios. Method: Ecological displays were evaluated alongside traditional and user-centered “advanced” displays in a full-scope nuclear power plant simulation. Licensed plant operators used the displays in realistic scenarios that either had procedural support or did not have procedural support. All three displays were evaluated for their ability to support operator situation awareness. Results: A significant three-way interaction effect was observed on two independent measures of situation awareness. For both measures, ecological displays improved situation awareness in scenarios that did not have procedural support, primarily in the detection phases of those scenarios. No other pronounced effects appeared across both measures. Conclusions: The observed improvement was sufficiently large to suggest that EID could improve situation awareness in situations where procedures are unavailable. However, the EID displays did not lead to improved situation awareness in the other conditions of the evaluation, and participants using these displays occasionally underperformed on single measures of situation awareness. This suggests that the approach requires further development, particularly in integrating EID with procedural support. Application: This research has important findings for the ongoing development of the EID approach, the design of industrial operator displays, and design to support situation awareness.

Modeling a medical environment: an ontology for integrated medical informatics design.

Modern medical environments have seen an increase in technological complexity and pressures of handling more patients with fewer resources, resulting in higher demands on medical practitioners. Medical informatics designers will have to focus on the problem of organizing medical information more effectively to enable practitioners to cope with these challenges. This article addresses this research problem for the particular area of medical problem solving in patient care. First, we describe a traditional modeling approach for medical reasoning used as a basis for developing some decision support systems. We argue these models may be faithful to what is known about biomedical knowledge, but they have limitations for human problem solving, especially in unanticipated situations. Second, we present an ontological framework, known as the abstraction hierarchy (Rasmussen, IEEE Trans. Man. Cybernetics 15 (1985) 234-243), for integrating patient representations that are faithful to existing biomedical knowledge and that are consistent with what is known about human problem solving. Through an example of a critical event in the operating room, we reveal how this framework can support medical problem solving in unanticipated situations. Third, we show how to use these representations as a frame of reference for mapping medical roles, responsibilities, sensors, and controls in an operating room context. Finally, we provide some insight for medical informatics designers in using this framework to design novel training programs and human-computer displays.

Putting It All Together: Improving Display Integration in Ecological Displays

Computer displays are being designed for increasingly larger industrial systems. As the application domain scales up, maintaining integration across different kinds of views becomes more challenging. This paper presents the results of a study of three different approaches to integration based on the spatial and temporal proximity of related information objects. The domain used for evaluation was a simulation of an industry-scale conventional power plant. All three displays were ecological displays developed using an abstraction hierarchy analysis. Views were integrated in a high-space/low-time, low-space/high-time, and high-space/high-time integration of means-end related objects. During a fault detection and diagnosis task, it as found that a low level of integration, high-space/low-time, provided the fastest fault detection time. However, the most integrated condition, high-space/high-time, resulted in the fastest and most accurate fault diagnosis performance. Actual or potential applications of this research include computer displays for large-scale systems such as network management or process control, for which problem solving is critical and integration must be maintained.

Navigation strategies with ecological displays

Abstract Ecological interface design (EID) has shown success as an approach for interface design in the case of a process control microworld. However, in applying the EID approach to larger systems, questions arise as how to support the navigation and integration of abstract information. In this study, three ecological displays were developed for a simulated power plant from the same abstraction hierarchy. The displays differed in the integration of abstract information, demonstrating high-space low-time, low-space high-time, and high-space high-time integration. While using the displays, the screen actions of subjects were recorded and their navigation movements studied through maps of navigation trajectories. Distinct differences were apparent between the temporally integrated and the temporally separated displays. In the temporally separated displays, clear scanning patterns emerged and these scanning patterns were correlated with improved performance on the display. This suggests that scanning patterns are an adaptation to needed but separated information. It also suggests that functional integration is an important characteristic to support when designing large ecological displays.

Applications of cognitive work analysis

Applications of cognitive work analysis , Applications of cognitive work analysis , کتابخانه دیجیتالی دانشگاه علوم پزشکی و خدمات درمانی شهید بهشتی

Behavior Change Techniques Present in Wearable Activity Trackers: A Critical Analysis.

Background Wearable activity trackers are promising as interventions that offer guidance and support for increasing physical activity and health-focused tracking. Most adults do not meet their recommended daily activity guidelines, and wearable fitness trackers are increasingly cited as having great potential to improve the physical activity levels of adults. Objective The objective of this study was to use the Coventry, Aberdeen, and London-Refined (CALO-RE) taxonomy to examine if the design of wearable activity trackers incorporates behavior change techniques (BCTs). A secondary objective was to critically analyze whether the BCTs present relate to known drivers of behavior change, such as self-efficacy, with the intention of extending applicability to older adults in addition to the overall population. Methods Wearing each device for a period of 1 week, two independent raters used CALO-RE taxonomy to code the BCTs of the seven wearable activity trackers available in Canada as of March 2014. These included Fitbit Flex, Misfit Shine, Withings Pulse, Jawbone UP24, Spark Activity Tracker by SparkPeople, Nike+ FuelBand SE, and Polar Loop. We calculated interrater reliability using Cohens kappa. Results The average number of BCTs identified was 16.3/40. Withings Pulse had the highest number of BCTs and Misfit Shine had the lowest. Most techniques centered around self-monitoring and self-regulation, all of which have been associated with improved physical activity in older adults. Techniques related to planning and providing instructions were scarce. Conclusions Overall, wearable activity trackers contain several BCTs that have been shown to increase physical activity in older adults. Although more research and development must be done to fully understand the potential of wearables as health interventions, the current wearable trackers offer significant potential with regard to BCTs relevant to uptake by all populations, including older adults.

Lessons From a Comparison of Work Domain Models: Representational Choices and Their Implications

As methods in cognitive work analysis become more widely applied, questions regarding the impact of modeling choices and similarities in modeling efforts across projects and domains are increasingly relevant. However, no explicit comparison of models of similar systems has been reported. This paper compares independently developed work domain analysis (WDA) models of two command and control environments. Similarities in model content and the types of nodes included provide evidence that WDA techniques can capture fundamental elements regarding purposes and constraints. These points of agreement provide a common starting point for developing work domain representations of military command and control systems. The comparison also revealed differences between the models. Although differences in content reflected differences in scope of coverage and level of detail, other differences corresponded to more fundamental choices in modeling approach. These included the treatment of sensors, level of integration in the model, and representation of particular abstract constraints. Examination of these more fundamental differences pointed to important degrees of freedom in how to represent a WDA and clarified the implications of these modeling choices for guiding design. Actual or potential applications of this research include aiding analysts in making work domain modeling choices as well as producing work domain models of command and control environments.

Ecological interface design: a new approach for visualizing network management

Effective network management is a key to maximizing the performance of todays networks. Active monitoring of networks is still largely the domain of human network managers and yet, the support tools provided to these operators are typically not integrated and dated in their interface design. Ecological interface design (EID) is a systematic approach, drawn from nuclear power plant control, for designing visualizations that uses a multi-level analysis to develop graphics designed to support problem solving and management activities. We demonstrate the adaptation of this approach to network management and show how visualization tools can be designed. Finally we evaluated the EID tool against an industry tool, HPOpenView Network Node Manager in a series of detection and diagnosis tasks. While we observed slightly faster detection times with Network Node Manager, the EID tool generated faster diagnosis times and more accurate diagnoses. Finally we took our tool to professional network managers for a qualitative evaluation.

Ecological Interface Design in the Nuclear Domain: An Empirical Evaluation of Ecological Displays for the Secondary Subsystems of a Boiling Water Reactor Plant Simulator

Laboratory studies have shown that ecological interfaces can enhance operator performance in process control. However, limited verification and validation studies in representative settings are impeding the adoption of the Ecological Interface Design (EID) framework in the nuclear domain. A companion article presents an application of EID to the secondary side of a boiling water reactor plant simulator, demonstrating that the framework can lead to display features and verification criteria relevant to supporting operators in both anticipated and unanticipated situations. This article presents an empirical study as a first step towards the validation of EID in the nuclear domain. The results suggest that ecological displays have a marked advantage in supporting operator performance during monitoring for unanticipated events as compared to mimic-based displays. The ecological displays did not support operator performance differently for other types of tasks. This study provides supporting or validation evidence that EID is effective at a scale and level of complexity that is representative of nuclear power plant operations. The implications for introducing ecological displays into NPP control rooms are discussed.