Touchscreens for Aircraft Navigation Tasks: Comparing Accuracy and Throughput of Three Flight Deck Interfaces Using Fitts' Law

Comparative analysis of touchscreen inceptors and traditional sidesticks on flight decks: flight performance, visual behaviours and situation awareness

The concept of touchscreen primary control device is a novel approach of touchcreen implentation. The objective of this study is to investigate differences in flight performance and attention allocation between a touchscreen inceptor and a traditional sidestick. Twenty-one participants flew four simulated instrument landing system (ILS) approaches - with the touchscreen inceptor or traditional sidestick - during flight scenarios where an aircraft attitude disturbance was either present or absent. Results demonstrated that participant performance scores were worse with the touchscreen inceptor compared to the sidestick during attitude disturbance scenarios. Interestingly, participants exhibited reduced attention to external visual cues with the touchscreen inceptor compared to the sidestick. In addition, use of the touchscreen inceptor resulted in lower performance and lower self-reported situation awareness. Overall, the touchscreen inceptor demonstrated poorer performance compared to the traditional sidestick, highlighting limitations in its current design that warrant cautious consideration and further investigation.

Teaching advanced technology (ADAS) and use of touch screens in driver training in Norway

As many as 4,601 people were injured or killed on the roads in Norway in 2022. This number is too high and highlights the necessity of putting road safety on the agenda. The car industry today is represented by a vast increase in advanced technology for drivers to interact with, and knowing how and when to use this technology is crucial for safe driving. Thus, our research question was: Does the Norwegian driver training industry teach advanced driver assistance technology (ADAS) and touch screens in their driver training?

A survey was distributed to 1,058 driving schools in Norway, resulting in 333 responses. The results showed that driving instructors spend considerably more effort on teaching inbuilt driving assist technologies that enhance driving safety than on those that are designed to enhance safety but that, if not understood well, could lead to hazardous outcomes. Suggestions on how to improve driver training and driving instructor education are made. Research and practical implications are presented to make sure that driving education is updated and aligned with technological advancements in the automobile industry and to ensure traffic safety for all road users.

Response Preparation Affects Cognitive Motor Control

OBJECTIVE

We investigated how the ability to control whether or not to inhibit an action is affected by the response preparation.

BACKGROUND

The ability to control actions is a central skill to properly behave in complex environments. Increased levels of response preparation are associated with reduced response times, but how they directly affect the ability to control actions is not well explored. We investigated how the response preparation affects the ability to control the generation of actions in the context of a stop selective task.

METHOD

Participants performed a visuo-motor stop selective task.

RESULTS

We found that an increased level of response preparation reduced the ability to control actions. In the condition with high preparation, we observed shorter response times and increased probability of wrong responses to a request to stop, compared to a condition with a lower level of preparation.

CONCLUSION

We demonstrated that high response preparation hinders action control.

APPLICATION

Understanding the cognitive factors that affect the ability to properly control actions is crucial to develop devices that can be exploited in different contexts such as the aviation, industrial, and military. We demonstrated that subjects' response preparation is a key factor influencing their ability to flexibly control their reaction to different stimuli. This study offers a suitable paradigm that can be used to investigate which system features in a controlled task promote an optimal balance between response speed and error rate.

Quantifying the Impact of Motions on Human Aiming Performance: Evidence from Eye Tracking and Bio-Signals

Working on a moving platform can significantly impede human performance. Previous studies on moving vehicles have often focused on the overall impact on general task performance, whereas our study's emphasis is on precise hand movements, exploring the interaction between body motion and the escalation of task difficulty. We recruited 28 participants to engage in reciprocal aiming tasks, following Paul Fitts's setting, under both in-motion and stationary conditions. The task index of difficulty (ID) was manipulated by varying the width of the targets and the distance between the targets. We measured participants' movement time (MT), performance errors, and monitored their eye movements using an eye-tracking device, heart rate (HR), and respiration rate (RR) during the tasks. The measured parameters were compared across two experimental conditions and three ID levels. Compared to the stationary conditions, the in-motion conditions degraded human aiming performance, resulting in significantly prolonged MT, increased errors, and longer durations of eye fixations and saccades. Furthermore, HR and RR increased under the in-motion conditions. Linear relationships between MT and ID exhibited steeper slopes under the in-motion conditions compared to the stationary conditions. This study builds a foundation for us to explore the control mechanisms of individuals working in dynamic and demanding environments, such as pilots in airplanes and paramedics in ambulances.

The research of touch screen usability in civil aircraft cockpit

With the advancement of touch screen technology, the application of touch screens in civil aircraft cockpits has become increasingly popular. However, further analysis and research are required to fully promote its applications. The paper researched the usability of touch screens in aircraft cockpit considering the operation performance and subjective NASA-TLX workload evaluation, conducted experimental research on three touch gestures: click, drag, and zoom. Additionally, a comparative analysis was conducted on the touch performance under different layouts, positions, touch sizes, dragging direction angles, and zoom multiples. The touch performance indicators include operation time, error rate, operation speed, and workload. The experimental results show that the 21 mm size has the minimum operation time and workload, and 18 mm size has the lowest error rate in the clicking tasks. Additionally, the performance and workload of the captain's layout are better than those of the co-pilot's layout, and the performance of the center console position is best. The operation speed of the dragging tasks is faster when performed at position R3 compared to other positions. The dragging moving angles with better operation speed are 80°-190° and 250°-290°. The operation performance and workload of the zooming tasks vary depending on the zoom multiples. As the multiple increases, the operation time and workload also increase. There is no difference in operation performance or workload between zooming in and zooming out. The paper provides experimental support and suggestions based on human operation and subjective NASA-TLX workload evaluation for the application of touch screens in civil aircraft cockpits.

Image Entropy-Based Interface Evaluation Method for Nuclear Power Plants

The digital interface is crucial for nuclear plant operators, influencing their decision-making significantly. However, evaluations of these interfaces often overlook users' decision-making performance; lack established standards, typically occurring after the design phase; and are unsuitable for large-scale assessments. Recognizing the vital role of interface information, this paper built on our previous research and proposed a method tailored for nuclear power plant interfaces, utilizing image entropy to evaluate the impact of information on decision-making. A comparative analysis with an experimental evaluation method empirically validated the effectiveness of the proposed method. This research offers a unique decision-making-centric method to interface evaluation, providing a standardized, adaptable framework for various design phases and enabling extensive and rapid evaluations.

Fitts' law on the flight deck: evaluating touchscreens for aircraft tasks in actual flight scenarios

This research investigated the effects of an abnormal flight environment using touch-based navigation displays (TNDs). Fitts' law was used to compare the performance of TNDs with control display units (CDUs) and mode control panel (MCPs) under three different flight scenarios (normal, turbulence and startled). A within-subjects design involving 15 male participants was used. Data were collected in respect to accuracy, movement time, subjective feelings, choices and comments. The results showed that under abnormal conditions, TNDs showed worse operation performance and stability than CDUs and MCPs; however, it was easy to learn from TNDs, and they provided a good user experience. Moreover, this research demonstrated the application of Fitts' law to describe pilot behaviours in interactive flight devices, particularly for tasks involving real flight operations. TND designs for aviation could be developed based on these findings to improve flight crew performance when using new technology.Practitioner summary: This research built a Fitts' law model to evaluate the performance of aircraft cockpit touchscreens under normal, turbulence and startled scenarios. We compared the different touchscreens (TNDs) with other traditional interactive devices, such as CDUs and MCPs. The results have implications for the design of aircraft cockpit touchscreens and define the task scenario. Furthermore, the results contribute to the development of scenes utilising Fitts' law.

Effective Throughput Analysis of Different Task Execution Strategies for Mid-Air Fitts' Tasks in Virtual Reality

Fitts' law and throughput based on effective measures are two mathematical models frequently used to analyze human motor performance in a standardized pointing task, e.g., to compare the performance of input and output devices. Even though pointing has been deeply studied in 2D, it is not well understood how different task execution strategies affect throughput in pointing in 3D virtual environments. In this work, we examine the effective throughput measure, claimed to be invariant to task execution strategies, in Virtual Reality (VR) systems with three such strategies, "as fast, as precise, and as fast and as precise as possible" for ray casting and virtual hand interaction, by re-analyzing data from a 3D pointing ISO 9241-411 study. Results show that effective throughput is not invariant for different task execution strategies in VR, which also matches a more recent 2D result. Normalized speed vs. accuracy curves also did not fit the data. We thus suggest that practitioners, developers, and researchers who use MacKenzie's effective throughput formulation should consider our findings when analyzing 3D user pointing performance in VR systems.

Influence of nuclear power plant interface complexity on user decision-making: an ERP study

ABSTRACUser decision-making concerning critical operations is very important to nuclear power plant (NPP) safety. The NPP interface is the main information source that guides decision-making; thus, a good interface design is essential. Among the interface design factors such as interface complexity, layout and colour, interface complexity (the amount of information in the interface) has the greatest impact on NPP operator decision-making. This paper used the event-related potential (ERP) to evaluate the impact of interface complexity on user decision-making and found interface complexity has a specific range suitable for decision-making. Based on this important finding, a fast and economical method of evaluating NPP interfaces in all design phases was proposed. This method compensates for the shortcomings of traditional methods, such as heuristic evaluation and experimental evaluation, which are inconvenient for evaluating interfaces in initial design phase; it can also be applied to interfaces with similar features in other industrial fields. Practitioner summary: Evaluation of the impact of NPP interface complexity on user decision-making through an ERP experiment revealed a specific range of interface complexity that facilitates user decision-making. Based on this finding, a new, fast and inexpensive interface evaluation method was proposed. Abbreviations: NPP: nuclear power plant, it is a thermal power station in which the heat source is a nuclear reactor; ERP: event-related potential, it is the measured brain response that is the direct result of a specific cognitive, or motor event.

Clear and present danger? Applying ecological interface design to develop an aviation risk management interface

Ecological Interface Design (EID) is a framework for developing dynamic interfaces that support operators to understand and take appropriate actions within highly-complex systems. This two-part study involved the development and evaluation of a novel EID-based static aviation risk management display. A within-subjects survey-based experiment employed measures of decision accuracy, situation awareness, user workload, usability, and user perceptions. Results from 23 participants showed that when compared to a risk interface utilised by a large aviation company, the EID display achieved higher usability and lower workload ratings with large effect sizes, with no differences in decision accuracy and situation awareness. The findings provide evidence that the EID framework can improve upon static traditional displays. Research contributions also include a novel model of an aviation ground operations system and an example application of EID to the development of a static display. Further research is necessary to identify the extent of the applications and benefits to static displays.