Interventions to support the management of work-related stress (WRS) and wellbeing/mental health issues for commercial pilots Abstract Research indicates that sources of work-related stress (WRS) impact on the physical, social, and psychological health of pilots. Furthermore, specific features of the job can increase a pilot’s risk in relation to developing a mental health (MH) issue. It is impossible to remove all stress from the work life of pilots. A high stress situation may not necessarily be detrimental to the person, once they have learned to cope with it in a healthy manner. Nonetheless, risk pertaining to WRS need to be effectively managed by a pilot’s employer. Therefore, it is important to identify solutions at an airline and pilot self-management level. This paper reports on the findings of human factors research undertaken with commercial pilots pertaining to work-related stress (WRS) and its impact on wellbeing, performance, and safety. The findings of a series of co-design workshops and a follow-up anonymous survey were analysed to identify potential solutions at (1) an airline and (2) pilot self-management level. Potential solutions are framed in relation to six impact scenarios. Furthermore, they are located within the existing regulatory framework, including the latest implementation rules (IR), acceptable means of compliance (ACM), and guidance material (GM) as outlined by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA 2019). Proposed interventions should promote wellbeing and positive mental health while also addressing suffering and mental ill health. Airline interventions might focus on enhancing existing Safety Management System (SMS) approaches to better manage risks pertaining to WRS, advancing new tools to enable wellbeing briefing, risk assessment, and reporting, and training pilots in relation to MH awareness, risk identifying behaviour, and coping strategies. Furthermore, new role/functions might be introduced to support the implementation and management of WRS/wellbeing/MH safety/risk processes at an airline level. Requirements for new digital tools to support pilot awareness of WRS/wellbeing/MH, self-management of WRS/wellbeing/MH and risk identification both inside and outside the cockpit are also proposed. Some of recommendations arising in this research require changes to the existing rule-making and/or modification to existing AMC and GM.

Information processing challenges and research directions in CCTV surveillance Abstract The aim of this paper is to review research on the cognitive processes involved in closed circuit television (CCTV) surveillance, and make recommendations for further research and for practitioners. CCTV provides a socially relevant context for visual attention and search, because it involves dynamic natural images, multiple cameras that are frequently expected to be monitored simultaneously and a range of significant events which are often accompanied by high levels of uncertainty. In recent years, increasing research attention has been paid to operators’ cognitive processes in CCTV surveillance. Prior to this, the focus was largely on evaluations of systems for the purposes of developing guidelines for system design. The literature review identified 56 relevant documents. These are discussed in terms of the purpose of CCTV surveillance, the design of the technical system, nature of images, scenes and significant events, and the implications for information processing by operators. Recommendations for future research include, amongst others, context specific research, search strategies and scanning patterns, mechanisms for re-engaging attention after task disengagement, the contribution of active visual analysis, behavioural cues that predict aberrant behaviour. Specific recommendations for practitioners are made regarding translating research findings into practice and enhancing the cognitive surveillance skills of operators.

Inspecting life: professional vision in assisted reproduction technology Abstract A growing scholarship in organization studies has examined how visual practices are informed by and situated within organizational settings and routines. Using the concept of professional vision, this is a study of the visual work of embryologists selecting human embryos in the field of assisted reproductive technologies. The term professional vision accentuates how embryologists cope with a number of tensions to accomplish disciplinary objectivity in their work. The study shows how visual practices are simultaneously individual and collective. While there are internationally enacted standard protocols guiding the routine-based work, these are continuously modified as novel clinical data is reported. Therefore, the embryologists’ inspection of life needs to actively accommodate both standard cases and deviations therefrom. This ultimately renders the professional vision of embryology something other than an “exact science” but rather a fluid, partly improvised, subjective, and at the same time highly specialized, routinized aesthetic practice. The study contributes to the emerging scholarship on visuality and professional vision in organizations, specifically to how standards are used in such practices. In addition, the study adds to the organizational research on assisted reproduction technology.

Complexity of the pediatric trauma care process: implications for multi-level awareness Abstract Trauma is the leading cause of disability and death in children and young adults in the US. While much is known about the medical aspects of inpatient pediatric trauma care, not much is known about the processes and roles involved in in-hospital care. Using human factors engineering methods, we combine interview, archival document, and trauma registry data to describe how intra-hospital care transitions affect process and team complexity. Specifically, we identify the 53 roles directly involved in patient care in each hospital unit and describe the 3324 total transitions between hospital units and the 69 unique pathways, from arrival to discharge, experienced by pediatric trauma patients. We continue the argument to shift from eliminating complexity to coping with it and propose supporting three levels of awareness to enhance the resilience and adaptation necessary for patient safety in health care, i.e., safety in complex systems. We discuss three levels of awareness (individual, team, and organizational), and describe challenges and potential sociotechnical solutions for each. For example, one challenge to individual awareness is high time pressure. A potential solution is clinical decision support of information perception, integration, and decision-making. A challenge to team awareness is inadequate “non-technical” skills, e.g., leadership, communication, role clarity; simulation or another form of training could improve these. The complex, distributed nature of this process is a challenge to organizational awareness; a potential solution is to develop awareness of the process and the roles and interdependencies within it, using process modeling or simulation.

Influence of cognitive ability on task performance of dynamic decision making in military vehicles under different task complexity Abstract With the increment of demands on task performance in military vehicles, reasons for task performance difference in dynamic decision making have received considerable attention. The aim of this study was to explore the reasons for performance difference of dynamic decision making in military vehicles. The different influences of cognitive ability on task performance were investigated between low and high task complexity. Task performance was assessed with task completion time and error rate. Task complexity was manipulated by altering three forms of load factor, consisting of number of alternatives, information load and interruption duration. Four types of cognitive abilities were measured, including reaction ability, memory ability, sustained attention ability and attention allocation ability. The results indicated that cognitive abilities were effective predictors of task performance. High task complexity was more detrimental to individuals with low cognitive ability in terms of operation speed, and to individuals with high cognitive ability in terms of operation accuracy. High memory ability became increasingly demanded in high complexity. The key points of enhancing task performance lay in crew selection based on cognitive ability test and pertinence training on balancing operation speed and accuracy. This study provides insights into performance difference of military vehicle crew in dynamic decision making, which has remarkable significance in current crew selection, training and task assignment.

The influences of product similarity on consumer preferences: a study based on eye-tracking analysis Abstract Product similarity plays an important role in affecting consumer preferences. Although the existing literature discusses consumer preferences or product similarity, there are only a few studies investigating their relationship. The current study explored the influences of product similarity on consumer preferences including the underlying cognitive processes by analyzing eye movement data as well as survey data and retrospective interviews. Forty-four participants were invited to take part in the experiment. The results showed that: (1) increases in preference decision time and fixation counts are caused by a higher product similarity; (2) more fixation time is spent on the ultimately chosen options than on the rejected ones and product similarity has no impact on this phenomenon; (3) preference randomness increases with the increase of product similarity; and (4) there is a negative correlation between the mean discrepancy degree of preference rating and the mean similarity rating. Understanding the influences of product similarity on consumer preferences may contribute to better product design and sales. Further studies should quantify the effects of product features on consumer preferences with more diverse stimulus materials and more advanced technologies and methods.

The coordination between train traffic controllers and train drivers: a distributed cognition perspective on railway Abstract Although there has long been a call for a holistic systems perspective to better understand real work in the complex domain of railway traffic, prior research has not strongly emphasised the socio-technical perspective. In operational railway traffic, the successful planning and execution of the traffic are the product of the socio-technical system comprised by both train drivers and traffic controllers. This paper presents a study inspired by cognitive ethnography with the aim to characterise the coordinating activities that are conducted by train traffic controllers and train drivers in the work practices of the socio-technical system of Swedish railway. The theoretical framework of distributed cognition (DCog) is used as a conceptual and analytical tool to make sense of the complex railway domain and the best practices as they are developed and performed “in the wild”. The analysis reveals a pattern of collaboration and coordination of actions among the workers and we introduce the concept of enacted actionable practices as a key concern for understanding how a successfully executed railway traffic emerges as a property of the socio-technical system. The implications for future railway research are briefly discussed.

Estimation and quantification of vigilance using ERPs and eye blink rate with a fuzzy model-based approach Abstract Vigilance, also known as sustained attention, is defined as the ability to maintain concentrated attention over prolonged time periods. Many methods for vigilance detection, based on biological and behavioural characteristics, have been proposed in the literature. In general, the existing approaches do not provide any solution to measure vigilance level quantitatively and adopt costly equipment. This paper utilizes a portable electroencephalography (EEG) device and presents a new method for estimation of vigilance level of an individual by utilizing event-related potentials (P300 and N100) of EEG signals and eye blink rate. Here, we propose a fuzzy rule-based system using amplitude and time variations of the N100 and P300 components and blink variability to establish the correlation among N100, P300, eye blink and the vigilance activity. We have shown, with the help of our proposed fuzzy model, we can efficiently calculate and quantify the vigilance level, and thereby obtain a numerical value of vigilance instead of its mere presence or absence. To validate the results obtained from our fuzzy model, we performed subjective analysis (for assessing the mood and stress level of participants), reaction time analysis and compared the vigilance values with target detection accuracy. The obtained results prove the efficacy of our proposal.

Cognition-based MRI brain tumor segmentation technique using modified level set method Abstract Gliomas are the most common types of brain tumors seen in adults. Generally, it starts from glioma cells and affects the adjacent tissues. Even though the analysis of glioma has well developed, the identification is still poor. In this paper, we propose an efficient modified level set method for brain tumor segmentation, in which we preprocess the image to remove the noise and then accurately segment the magnetic resonance images (MRI). Therefore, this document anticipated an innovative level set algorithm for segmenting gliomas from the MRI brain images where the segmentation is made automatically by means of selecting the initial contour automatically from the maximum intensity pixel computed from the histogram intensity plots. The proposed methodology is implemented in the working platform of MATLAB to produce 99% accuracy, and the results are analyzed by the existing methods.

Maintenance schedules as boundary objects for improved organizational reliability Abstract Organizations that manage complex technologies use planning in various forms to determine priorities and structure work with the goal of controlling both production and system reliability. In addition to this purely functional view of planning, there is a social dimension that also has important system safety implications. Drawing on 53 semi-structured interviews with workers at a nuclear fuel processing plant, this paper addresses the role of the schedule for planned maintenance work. Characterizing the schedule as a boundary object highlights the socio-material dimension of high reliability organizing. It sheds light on the negotiation that takes place at the boundary between five worker groups around the schedule, which allows cooperation without the need for consensus thanks to the interpretive flexibility. Diversity of views is acknowledged, but resolved sufficiently. A ‘reliable’ schedule is one that is accurate enough to facilitate necessary conversations without providing unnecessary constraints. It is a balance between what should be brought to light and what should deliberately be left in the shadows. Yet, the possibility for the schedule to act as a boundary object and to support interdepartmental coordination and organizational reliability depends on organizational and occupational conditions. When managers see the schedule as an object of control, they seek to impose additional standardization. Taken to the extreme, introducing rigidity into the system is aimed at organizational invariance that HRO researchers warn is not the key to reliable operations. The role and legitimacy of planners is also discussed, as a safeguard against the schedule becoming a fantasy plan.