Human performance measurement methods for the armored vehicles domain

Authors:

  • Castor Martin
  • Nählinder Staffan
  • Lindström Per

Publish date: 2003-01-01

Report number: FOI-R--0927--SE

Pages: 50

Written in: Swedish

Abstract

The main battle tank and armored personal carriers of today are to a larger and larger extent equipped with command and control systems, information systems and sophisticated sensors to improve their battle effectiveness. The result is that the crew is forced to process more and more information during a mission. Great effort must be invested during the design of new information systems so that the man-system interaction process is optimized and information overload avoided. As a part of the Swedish systems development project WCS (Warning and countermeasures system) for armored vehicles researchers from the Man System Interaction Department at FOl have performed human performance measurements on tank crews during 2002 and 2003. The toolbox of measures that have been developed in the research project `Mental Workload and Performance Measurement´ have been developed to support system development, comparisons between simulated and real exercises etc. Earlier research and human performance measurements have primarily been conducted in the aviation domain and have here been modified for use in the armored vehicles domain. Three main types of measures have been tried: subjective ratings, psychophysiological measures and objective performance measures. The methodology is here applied in a "new" domain and the collected psychophysiological data must be analyzed to see what they mean in the domain of armored vehicles. The results presented in the report are thus to be regarded as examples of the types of results the measures can provide.