Sytronics (United States)

Aviation helmets have always served as an interface between technology and flyers. The functional evolution of helmets continued with the advent of radio when helmets were modified to accept communication components and later, oxygen masks. As development matured, interest in safety increased as evident in more robust designs. Designing helmets became a balance between adding new capabilities and reducing the helmet's weight. As the research community better defined acceptable limits of weight-tolerances with tools such as the “Knox Box” criteria, system developers added and subtracted technologies while remaining within these limits. With most helmet-mounted technologies being independent of each other, the level of precision in mounting these technologies was not as significant a concern as it is today. The attachment of new components was acceptable as long as the components served their purpose. However this independent concept has become obsolete with the dawn of modern helmet mounted displays. These complex systems are interrelated and demand precision in their attachment to the helmet. The helmets' role now extends beyond serving as a means to mount the technologies to the head, but is now instrumental in critical visual alignment of complex night vision and missile cueing technologies. These new technologies demand a level of helmet fit and component alignment previously not seen in past helmet designs. This paper presents some of the design, integration and logistical issues gleaned during the development of the Joint Helmet Mounted Cueing System (JHMCS) to include the application of head-track technologies in forensic investigations.

Describes design of a feedback H/sup /spl infin// linear parameter varying controller scheduled on the pneumatic muscle pressure, which optimally rejects external disturbances and copes with dynamic uncertainty.

A wireless MEMS force/pressure/temperature sensor was utilized in the collection of data from a study involving a strap support system to be used in conjunction with human subjects. Both static and dynamic data were collected to demonstrate the efficacy of the sensor described herein. The wireless property and ability to place the sensor at arbitrary points provides great utility for the application of such a MEMS apparatus.

Past research on wearable computers for maintenance applications has focused on developing displays and presentation formats. This study emphasized wearable computer control technologies. Alternative control technologies were compared with standard and voice controls. Twelve subjects performed a synthetic maintenance task using three control device combinations for three different types of input. Time and error data were collected. The results show that for pointer movement, standard controls took significantly longer than voice. For discrete input, standard controls required significantly more time than voice and alternative controls. However, there were no significant time differences among controllers for text entry fill-in. Error results showed no significant differences. This research suggests that alternative and voice controls provide similar performance levels and both are superior to standard controls. In environments with changing noise spectra and noise levels such as a flight line, the alternative control suite provides hands-free control that complements voice without sacrificing performance.

As the Army prepares to move into the next century, it is exploring advances in technology that will enable U.S. military forces to obtain more complete data regarding its mission, enemy and friendly troop locations, weather, and target status. Not only will this data be more accurate, it will be collected and transmitted in near real-time. Advanced displays must be developed that allow commanders to efficiently deal with large volumes of data so that effective decisions can be made in a timely manner. This paper describes an experiment comparing three methods of displaying battlefield resources and unit mobility: (1) a combination of alphanumerics and standard Army decision graphics, (2) a configural display (CD) representation, and (3) an associative configural display representation (ACD). Results indicate that performance benefits are realized from both the CD and ACD representations, but the CD proved to be the best overall.

The USAF has been using a multivariate method for specifying pilot body size for nearly ten years. The Multivariate Accommodation software was originally written for a VMS environment using the statistical package SAS. It is now available for PC computers. The program is based on the CADRE statistical method developed by Bittner (1987), and the Anthropometric Database at the Computerized Anthropometric Research and Design Laboratory (Robinson et al., 1992), and has been very effective in increasing body size accommodation in USAF cockpit designs. The technique relies on principal component analysis which describes the variation of the original multivariate distribution with a set of orthogonal axes (principal components). Selection of the anthropometric measurements, the number of principal components used to represent the variation in their distribution, and a full understanding of the assumptions implicit in the model are all critical in generating useful representative accommodation cases. The authors will discuss previous applications of the method as well as demonstrate its limitations when used outside of cockpit/workstation designs.

Anthropometric surveys conducted by the military provide comprehensive human body measurement data that are human interface requirements for successful mission performance of weapon systems, including cockpits, protective equipment, and clothing. The application of human body dimensions to model humans and human-machine performance begins with engineering anthropometry. There are two critical elements to engineering anthropometry: data acquisition and data analysis. First, the human body is captured dimensionally with either traditional anthropometric tools, such as calipers and tape measures, or with advanced image acquisition systems, such as a laser scanner. Next, numerous statistical analysis tools, such as multivariate modeling and feature envelopes, are used to effectively transition these data for design and evaluation of equipment and work environments. Recently, Air Force technology transfer allowed researchers at the Computerized Anthropometric Research and Design (CARD) Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to work with the Dayton, Ohio area medical community in assessing the rate of wound healing and improving the fit of total contract burn masks. This paper describes the successful application of CARD Lab engineering anthropometry to two medically oriented human interface problems.

Today I would like to talk about what I consider the critical issues facing human factors engineering and research in psychology in general. One of those critical issues is cognitive engineering. This is something that has been bandied around in the past ten years, and I still don’t know a definite definition of it. But I think it is something that’s drastically needed, both in the development of complex human-machine systems and in the work of psychologists. I think that psychologists are guilty of not doing the right things to make cognitive engineering accessible to engineers. Let us try to come up with some kind of definition. If you consider engineering as building things, cognitive engineering is building things, or design, considering the expectations and understanding of the user. If you look at the human factors, I’d like to differentiate the human factors engineering that evolved after World War II, that is a domain that could be characterized as dealing mostly with knobs and dials, and with how to reach things, to see things, with human perceptions, and less so with how to fully understand the use of things and how to make optimum use of things. But today still, for the most part, if you go into organizations that build things, and where people actually design things for users, I would put big money on the bet that 90% of the time when a product such as software of some kind is considered, it has been designed with little or no understanding of psychology.KeywordsKnowledge AcquisitionBinocular DisparityCognitive EngineerCognitive EngineeringHuman Factor EngineeringThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

This paper describes a signal processing method for automated detection, identification, and registration (ALDIR) of optically marked anatomical fiduciary landmarks from 3-D laser digitized body segment measurements. The method described is a multistage process. In the first stage, body surface reflectivity and topography information is used to detect optical markers in digitized measurement data. In the second stage, a maximum likelihood identification is used to identify each of the detected landmarks. Finally, the method identified landmarks and their relative spatial coordinates are registered and output. This can be used in a prosthetics-orthotics (or other) computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing (CAD/CAM) system to compute a quantitative diagnostic measure of the patient's physiological state; as a measure of efficacy of a given medical treatment regimen; or an addition to an anthropometric/medical data base.

Describes a technique for capturing wound characteristics with a laser surface scanning system. Analysis using both range and color information from this image is used to measure specific wound features. These wound features can be evaluated over time for determination of wound progression and as wound response to therapy.