Towards an Experimental Design Framework for Evaluation of Dynamic Workload and Situational Awareness in Safety Critical Maritime Settings

Abstract

Dynamic positioning (DP) systems are complex systems that challenges the operator’s mind during complex offshore DP operations. It is both mentally demanding and the operator has to maintain constant situation awareness to be able to react in time to safety–critical situations. The research design that will be presented in this work-in-progress paper, aims at investigating the variations of high and low mental workload during dynamic positioning operations in the maritime domain using advanced eye–tracking equipment. This type of equipment is utilized to assess the operator’s focal areas on the vessel’s bridge during the operation and correlate the eye-tracking results with more traditional metrics measuring mental workload, such as heart rate monitoring and NASA-TLX. The experiment has been divided into four different sub-experiments, where the last iteration will compare workload assessments between a current and a new graphical user interface of a DP system. The results from these experiments will give valuable insight in DP operations and provide possibilities of tailoring placement of information from the DP system so that safety can be improved by supporting the operator during operation.

Contributors

Dr. Frøy Birte Bjørneseth

Sathiya K. Renganayagalu

Dr. Mark D. Dunlop

Dr. Eva Hornecker

Dr. Sashidharan Komandur

Conference

Publication date: September 2012

Publication date (Print): September 2012

Pages: 309-314

Affiliations

Rolls–Royce Marine AS

Aalesund, Norway

Aalesund University

College/ Maritime HF Lab

Aalesund, Norway

University of Strathclyde

Glasgow, Scotland

Aalesund University

College

Aalesund, Norway

Article

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/HCI2012.43

Copyright statement: © Frøy Birte Bjørneseth et al. Published by BCS Learning and Development Ltd. The 26th BCS Conference on Human Computer Interaction, Birmingham, UK

License:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: The 26th BCS Conference on Human Computer Interaction

Conference acronym: HCI

Conference number: 26

Conference location: Birmingham, UK

Conference date: 12 - 14 September 2012

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: Human Computer Interaction

Product

Product Information: 1477-9358BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/HCI2012.43

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

Categories

Series title: Electronic Workshops in Computing