Keith S. Karn

Human Factors in Context LLC

Riding a bicycle, walking, and running are generally health-promoting and environmentally friendly activities, but tens of thousands of cyclists and hundreds of thousands of pedestrians worldwide die in accidents each year. There is an urgent need to address this complex problem with a multidisciplinary and multi-faceted approach. This panel will p...

Human factors/ergonomics is an applied discipline. As such, we question whether students are adequately prepared if they are not learning, at least in part, from instructors who have real-world experience applying human factors/ergonomics knowledge to practical design problems. A wide variety of other disciplines such as medicine, the building trad...

Objective We review the effects of COVID-19 on the human sense of smell (olfaction) and discuss implications for human-system interactions. We emphasize how critical smell is and how the widespread loss of smell due to COVID-19 will impact human-system interaction. Background COVID-19 reduces the sense of smell in people who contract the disease....

User research in all its forms—from early ethnographic studies to late stage usability validation studies— undoubtedly can add value to any product design and development process. At its best, user research is tightly integrated with the design process, and designers and other team members eagerly seek out research findings to guide design decision...

In order to preserve some important historical information and perspective, this paper will present human factors engineering innovations and success stories in aircraft cockpit design for the US Navy and US Marine Corps over the last 50 years. This is a story of close collaboration between human factors professionals serving as active duty militar...

Now that they are beyond the initial start‐up phase, it is time to take a critical look at ride‐hailing systems such as Uber and Lyft. This ethnographic case study investigates these systems from the drivers' perspectives and also addresses the ethnographic techniques and general approach that we used. Without a protocol, budget or equipment, we in...

Healthcare working environments are complex, and intensive care units (ICUs) are particularly complex due to the influx of data to the healthcare professionals who are providing continuous care to the most critically ill patients. Systems that are designed to work in these environments should take into consideration varied patient conditions, the c...

Historically it has not been terribly difficult for researchers to gain access to healthcare facilities to conduct user research such as contextual inquiry and workflow analysis. Today, some practitioners are finding it nearly impossible to get into facilities. One reason is that hospitals are getting progressively more risk-averse regarding patien...

The goal of this project is to improve clinical decision-making in the intensive care unit (ICU) environment. Making the optimal decisions depends on the quality and timeliness of the information available to the clinician. We believe that healthcare professionals will make better clinical decisions when the relevant information is collected and or...

Insurance companies, healthcare providers, and patients are realizing we can treat many medical issues at home and avoid expensive and often inconvenient visits to the doctor’s office or hospital. As a result, many medical devices are now in the hands of untrained patients and caregivers, creating a growing market of consumer medical (or “medsumer”...

This chapter begins with a call for reintegration of hardware and software user interface (UI) development, which have evolved into separate silos within many organizations. Prior to 1980, user interface design fell under the domain of industrial design (ID) and mechanical engineering. With the advent of the Age of Computers, and hardware and UI so...

Facilitating a user research session can be a juggling act involving many competing considerations, even without the added pressure of accurately capturing the experience for later analysis. In this panel, we will talk about how to balance capturing user research data in a way that minimizes burdens on researchers and participants. We will also add...

This panel will provide a forum for discussing typical challenges that arise for human factors consulting practices when focused on designing products for healthcare, either medical devices, healthcare software, or related materials. In particular we will address questions about what, if anything, is different about consulting on healthcare product...

The overarching goal of this project is to develop engineering requirements for future information resources in the ICU. We describe a method and related instrumentation for collecting data about information requirements from a clinical team in situ. Video records are collected using three consumer-grade video cameras, augmented by a wireless micro...

There exists a disconnect between users of the science of human factors, that is, designers and practitioners, and producers of the science, that is, human factors researchers. Research results are primarily disseminated by articles published in scientific, peer reviewed journals, that are often targeted to other scientists, not designers or practi...

There has been considerable study and discussion regarding the appropriate role of the human operator in automated systems. Closed-loop systems are commonplace in manufacturing, power plant control, and aircraft control, and there is a growing body of research and public discussion related to automobile control. Closed-loop systems are less common...

Our objective is to provide thumb reach envelopes to help guide the placement of controls on handheld devices and to provide useful methods to gather and analyze thumb reach data. With the proliferation of handheld, interactive devices, such as cameras, mobile phones, game systems, and remote controls, human factors professionals involved in design...

Integration of information technology (IT) in the medical field has increased with the patient safety movement of the past decade, but without an optimization of user interface (UI) design. In particular, health IT such as an emergency department information system (EDIS) is becoming a common tool in EDs across the US. While there are published sta...

Fixation sequence analysis can reveal the cognitive strategies that drive eye movements. Unfortunately this type of analysis is not as common as other popular eye movement measures, such as fixation duration and trace length, because the proper tools for fixation sequence analysis are not incorporated into most popular eye movement software. This p...

Identifying problems and generating recommendations for product user interface redesign are primary goals of usability testing. Typical methods seem inadequate for the deep understanding of usability problems needed for developing effective solutions. Sporadically over the past 50 years, usability teams have tracked user eye movements to achieve th...

This section considers the application of eye movements to user interfaces—both for analyzing interfaces, measuring usability, and gaining insight into human performance—and as an actual control medium within a human-computer dialogue. The two areas have generally been reported separately; but this book seeks to tie them together. For usability ana...

To understand visual perception we must examine visual processes that operate over time scales longer than a single fixation. In this paper, we argue that it is necessary to consider behavioral context in order to address this issue. We consider two types of behavior that might require information acquired in different fixations. First, we describe...

The change blindness phenomenon suggests that visual representations retained across saccades are very limited. In this paper we sought to specify the kind of information that is in fact retained. We investigated targeting performance for saccadic eye movements, since one need for visual representations across eye and body positions may be to guide...

Users of most video-based eye trackers apply proximity algorithms to identify fixations and assume that saccades are what happen in between. Most video-based eye trackers sample at 60 Hz., a rate which is too low to reliably find small saccades in an eye position record. We propose to call these slower eye trackers and their typical proximity analy...

Usability testing methods have not changed significantly since the origins of the practice. Usability studies typically address human performance at a readily observable task-level, including measures like time to complete a task, percentage of participants succeeding, type and number of errors, and subjective ratings of ease of use [3]. Certain ty...

Usability testing methods have not changed significantly since the origins of the practice. Usability studies typically address human performance at a readily observable task-level, including measures like time to complete a task, percentage of participants succeeding, type and number of errors, and subjective ratings of ease of use [3]. Certain ty...

Usability studies are usually conducted in a compressed time scale (measured in hours) compared with a user's eventual experience with a product (often measured in years). For this reason, typical usability evaluations focus on success during initial interactions with a product (sea for example Dumas & Redish, 1994 and Nielsen & Mack, 1994). Succes...

We attempt to determine the egocentric reference frame used in directing saccades to remembered targets when landmark-based (exocentric) cues are not available. Specifically, we tested whether memory-guided saccades rely on a retina-centered frame, which must account for eye movements that intervene during the memory period (thereby accumulating er...

Koriat & Goldsmith restrict their definition of memory to “being about some past event,” which causes them to ignore the most common use of memory: everyday visual-motor tasks. New techniques make it possible to study memory in the context of these natural tasks with which memory is so tightly coupled. Memory can be more fully understood in the con...

Industry and academia often have differing desires in the introductory Human Factors education of engineering students. Industry seeks solutions to current problems, whereas academia can communicate state-of-the-art concepts without immediate application. This panel session united members of academia and industry for discussion of what topics and s...

This study investigated the effects of two hours of CRT display viewing on dark focus, dark vengence, and subjective ratings of visual fatigue. Recently several studies have reported shifts of the dark focus of accommodation and dark vergence after short periods of display viewing at extreme distances. Many studies have attempted to link these and...

Thesis (M.S.)--North Carolina State University. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 128-133). Includes vita.