gizmag Article: The future of the human-computer interface

"A new Australian research facility called the Visual Information Access Room (VIAR) is at the forefront of the coming revolution in human-digital interaction. The current keyboard, mouse and screen configuration will soon be replaced by digital interfaces that utilise touch, gesture and voice control and seek to integrate seamlessly into our environment. Launched by the National ICT Australia (NICTA), the Sydney laboratory looks like a futuristic office, but is in fact a test facility where sophisticated 3D models of complex systems and innovative ways to interact with complex data quickly will be developed."

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Saab Puts Drivers In Picture For Safer Motoring

"Saab is helping drivers stay focused on the road by developing a safety system that monitors eye and head movements, and sounds a warning buzzer if the driver's attention strays long enough to risk causing an accident. At 55mph a car travels 81 feet in just one second - so the consequences of attention lapses, no matter how innocent or brief, can be extremely serious.

The Swedish company, with a world reputation for pursuing safety far beyond the requirements of legislation, is basing its pioneering system on what the driver actually does behind the wheel, instead of what he or she should be doing. "

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Occupational Hazards - Safeguarding: Are ANSI Standards Really Voluntary?

"The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) has a difficult task: how can it promulgate consensus standards, written entirely by volunteers in subcommittees and with no enforcement authority? In the case of ANSI's safety-related standards, how does this organization still warrant the attention of machine builders, OSHA, users and labor? In short, how does ANSI obtain respect and avoid being the Rodney Dangerfield of safety standards? The answer revolves around whether ANSI standards are really voluntary, or something much more.

One area of confusion for safety professionals, design engineers, machine builders and users involved with the implementation of the ANSI documents revolves around the enforceability of these consensus standards. After all, these are just voluntary standards, right? Well, the real answer is yes � and no. Technically, ANSI standards are considered voluntary consensus standards and are not written as laws or regulations. In fact, the subcommittees that create the standards have no enforcement authority, much to the relief, I am sure, of the subcommittee members! Yet the standards themselves are widely recognized in industry as an excellent source of reference material, often with an easier-to-understand format than that of OSHA."

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Anti-Whiplash System is contained within head restraint.,

"December 29, 2004 07:52 - Designed to reduce impact of whiplash injury in rear-end collisions, anti-whiplash system addresses IIHS concerns by aligning head with cervical spine. It uses electromagnetic actuator to release pre-stressed springs that simultaneously pivot headrest while pushing it forward. Independent of seatback frame, headrest houses 2 coil springs, plastic headrest housing, electromagnetically-activated plate, and wiring."

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OSHA's Enforcement Strategy

"The bottom line, and the statistics so indicate, is that enforcement activity remains OSHA's main focus.

OSHA's injury, illness, and inspection rates for 2001 lend credence to its stance that strict enforcement of standards, along with intensive education and development of alliances in the business community, is the winning prescription for die safety and health of American workers. Although under the Bush Administration OSHA has seen a number of its major initiatives either stalled or totally derailed (the ergonomics standard is an example), OSHAs commitment to ensuring employers provide and maintain a safe and healthful work environment for the worker is undiminished. Business organizations should understand that OSHA views a 'strong, fair, and effective' enforcement policy as essential to ensuring employers actually do promote and maintain such a safe and healthful work environment."

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Secret Speech Aid

"Soldiers and stroke victims might one day have something in common: a device that allows them to talk without speaking. As this ScienCentral News video reports, NASA engineers are developing technology that picks up and translates throat signals into words before they're even spoken. "

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Three Important Benefits of Personas

"Next time you have a chance to watch someone reading a map, look for the first thing they do. They'll likely do the exact same thing everyone else does: find themselves on the map.

It doesn't matter what kind of map it is, whether it's of their neighborhood or an amusement park. They'll open the map and find something that is personally meaningful, such as their house or their favorite roller coaster.

Psychologists call this 'grounding' -- the natural behavior of initially finding a known reference point in a foreign information space. Once the person has grounded themselves, they can then use the starting point to understand the rest of the space.

While grounding helps people adjust to complex situations, it can be detrimental when it happens during the design process. If, while conjuring up an interface, designers ground themselves in the design, they run the serious risk of creating an interface that only they can use."

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Social Aspects of Digital Information in Perspective

Within the past decade, social informatics research has grown to encompass a widening and interdisciplinary interest in studies that carefully examine the ways in which information and communications technologies (ICTs) are bound up in everyday social and organizational structures. It draws researchers who focus on the inter-relationships among people, their institutional and cultural contexts, and their uses of ICTs. This focus on 'ICT use in context' diverts some attention from the task at hand to pay more careful attention to the power relations that shape the task and the setting, as well as the roles of the social actors who use ICTs to perform their situated tasks.

Social informatics research gives prominence to theoretically informed, contextually attentive methodologies that build theory from empirical data. This focus distinguishes social informatics studies from other socially aware or proactive approaches, such as community informatics, discourse analytics, and other descriptively rich research domains. It blurs the line between theory and practice in ways that allow concepts to transcend such boundaries. That conceptual flow encourages informatics researchers to interact across disciplinary boundaries in ways that acknowledge biases and differences, while at the same time recognizing when this diversity can be a source of intellectual strength. "

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Situate Follow-Ups in Context

"Usability is often enhanced when people can find follow-up transactions on the page where they conducted their first transaction. Conversely, usability is reduced if the original page contains no hint of what people might need to do at a later stage.

Some examples:
We recently tested an intranet's e-learning area as part of our new round of intranet usability research. (The study is in progress; we'll report the results in the new advanced intranet usability tutorial at the Usability Week 2005 conferences in New York, Stockholm, London, and San Francisco.) One of the e-learning area tasks was for users to cancel their scheduled participation in a certain course. Rather than use the intranet's registration management feature, almost all users went straight to the course page where they'd originally signed up. Unfortunately, this page offered no link for withdrawing from the course.

In e-commerce usability, users typically look for product-related items on the main product's page. To buy ink for a specific fountain pen, for example, most people go to the page that sells that pen and hope it lists (or links to) compatible refill cartridges. People almost never go immediately to a special 'supplies' or 'support' area, though many websites keep related products there to mirror the company's organization. Even if you have an independent support organization, you should link to its offerings from the main page of each supported product.

On Amazon.com, when people visit the page for a book they've already ordered, there's a prominent box at the top of the page that notes the order and offers an easy link to track it.
As these examples show, users typically return to a previous location to follow-up on related actions. Familiar places are easy to find and create less me"

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Ergonomic Seating Positions Part II - Armrests - Ergonomics

"In sedentary occupations, our upper bodies are movable, actively engaged agents that propel our workday, our activities and our successes. The upper body includes our face, neck, shoulders, arms, hands and wrists. Technically, the rib cage and thoracic spine are included, as well.

Neutral Posture Body Awareness
The clavicle bone runs horizontally across the top of the ribcage. A good analogy would be to imagine the shoulder girdle as a yoke worn across the top of the torso. The arms are suspended from that yoke on each side. The neutral posture for arms is to hang down.

Injury Prevention
The goal for the upper body in computer ergonomics revolves around:

. Sustaining neutral posturing of the shoulders, arms and wrists.

. Minimizing the force used in striking a keyboard.

In my Computer Related Injuries article I mentioned Cumulative Trauma Disorders as a broad category that includes computer related injuries. Ergonomist and researcher Dennis Ankrum outlines causes of Cumulative Traumatic Disorders:

A.) Holding and non neutral postures.

B.) Local pressure.

C.) Forceful movements.

D.) Overexposure to cold or vibration.

The Value of Armrests
When we consider ergonomic seating, we need to know the value of armrests. Ergonomic research studies have shown that arm rests:

. help to lighten key striking force

. allow for a relaxed shoulder position.

These functions of armrests address two of the causes of computer injury prevention listed above (A. and C.)."

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Forbes.com:

"What's the best fabric for long underwear worn in cold weather?

That was the subject of a study done by the Section for Extreme Work Environment in Trondheim, Norway, where they know cold!The researchers tested a 100 percent polypropylene fabric and mixtures of polyprolylene and wool and wool-cotton polypropylene. They tested the fabrics when they were dry, and after they had been dampened.

And the winner? According to results published in Ergonomics, the choice of fiber didn't make much difference. The thickness of the underwear was the most important factor, regardless of what it was made of."

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Occupational Hazards - Dealing With Stress at Work

"We all know stress affects our mental and physical wellness -- both in positive and negative ways.

Stress at work is what energizes us and stimulates our creative thinking. It is also what frustrates and exhausts us.
The reality is that bad stress levels at work are getting higher with each passing year. Studies show that there is a significant connection between unmanaged stress and rising health care costs. According to a study or 46,026 employees conducted by The HERO Group, workers with unmanaged stress had 46 percent higher medical costs than those without unmanaged stress. This study also showed that unmanaged stress was the second leading cause of rising health care costs.

Today's workplace isn't like your grandparents' -- we're connected to work as never before by cell phones, pagers, PDAs and laptops. So it is essential to learn techniques to keep us focused on our work, to keep us productive and to create enjoyment in each workday."

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Ergonomics at work

"A little mess at the workplace can actually work for you. The old wisdom of keeping everything in place and tidy, including the computer area, can work against a worker because by making the paperwork disappear into files and folders, the worker may lose track of his thought processes and progress.

This is part of cognitive ergonomics, which refers to the interaction of the human mind with the work environment, and meant to create work environment that help people think and maximise productivity.

"A messy desktop, virtual or physical, does not equal an unproductive mind," said lecturer of Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (Unimas)- Cognitive Science Program, Shaziti Aman.

According to the principles of cognitive ergonomics, the entire scope of current work needs to be exposed, creating an arrangement that resembles the brain, she said.
Hence, post-its on the monitor and papers or files on the work surface are not mere mess as they resemble thoughts and ideas inside the mind which are work in progress. "These are called cognitive artifacts that act as an extension of our memory and thoughts," said Shaziti."

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Tom's Hardware Guide Mobile Devices: Goodbye Aching Neck: A Practical Test of Two Notebook Stands - The High Price Of Mobility: Neck And Back Pain

"The steadily growing number of mobile computers has led to a similarly growing number of 'road warriors' complaining of neck and back pain. Who among us hasn't seen one of our bent-necked colleagues slouched over a notebook until they're almost hanging right over the unit? " There are some practical reasons why this bad posture occurs. Traditional monitors are mounted on a stand that allows the user's gaze to be level with the display. In the case of notebooks, however, the lower edge of the display is nearly on the table. For that reason, laptop owners generally find themselves looking downwards while working.

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Occupational Hazards - NIOSH, ASSE Extend Partnership

"The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and the American Society of Safety Engineers (ASSE) have signed an agreement that extends their formal partnership to improve safety and health conditions in U.S. workplaces.

Under the agreement, NIOSH and ASSE pledge to continue to collaborate on providing outreach, communication and professional development opportunities and facilitating the transfer and use of effective workplace injury prevention measures. The partnership was established on Oct. 28, 2003, and the new agreement extends it for an additional 3 years."

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Occupational Hazards - AIHA Announces Top EHS Issues

"The American Industrial Hygiene Association (AIHA) released the results of its biannual public policy survey that projects the top public policy issues of concern the occupational and environmental health and safety (OEHS) profession over the next two years will include permissible exposure limits, emergency preparedness and response, ergonomics, OSHA reform and budgets for occupational safety and health and environmental agencies and material safety data sheets."

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New Standard Keyboards Announces Alphabetical Keyboard That Offers User-Friendly Benefits and Quick Data Entry for All Levels of Users

"New Standard Keyboards will debut a new patented design in computer keyboards at the CES show that the company claims has been 130 years in the making.
The new company will launch its first product -- the New Standard Keyboard -- at the 2005 International CES Show, January 6-9, 2005 in the Innovations Plus Room (IP534). This 53-key alphabetical-oriented keyboard with USB support for IBM-compatible systems is a long-awaited solution to the qwerty keyboard, which has haunted typists for 130 years, according to New Standard Keyboards."

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Newhouse A1

"Dan Katz is a 36-year-old lawyer, congressional aide and father. He also is a member of a growing global community known as 'the thumb generation.'

At his desk in the Hart Senate Office building, at his home in suburban Washington, at the mall with his wife and 11-month-old child, Katz is all thumbs as he tap-tap-taps away at his BlackBerry handheld e-mail device.

'I've gotten pretty good at it,' Katz said of his superior thumb typing skills. 'When I get my thumbs flying, I can get a message out in less than a minute, easily,' said the chief counsel to Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J."

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2004 National Ergonomics Conference Grows; Attendees' Choice Winners Announced; 80%+ of Exhibitors Renewed for 2005 Show

"The 10th Annual National Ergonomics Conference and Exposition (NECE) at Caesars Palace, Las Vegas, Nov. 30 - Dec. 3 saw more ergonomics and allied professionals attending the show than ever before. Attendees hailed from all 50 states, as well as Canada, India, U.K., China, and many other countries. Representatives from GM, Home Depot, HP, Microsoft, Starbucks, Walt Disney World and more sent representatives to attend educational sessions aimed at increasing worker safety and productivity."

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Managing Information News

"Libramation President Frank Mussche was featured recently in a special session on �Ergonomics� at the 2004 California Library Association Conference. The Marin County Free Library hosted the meeting which included library administration, staff, two professional ergonomists and an architect. "

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Antidote to Office Pain: Adjustable Workstations - 12/13/2004 - Design News - CA486946

"Fresh research from a prominent ergonomics expert verifies what most of us instinctively knew: Changing positions relieves the strains of cubicle life.
Professor Alan Hedge of Cornell University's Human Factors and Ergonomics Research Laboratory studied 53 office professionals who spend most of their day in front of computers, including Intel design engineers in Santa Clara, CA, and CNA insurance workers in Chicago. Participants were asked to compare their experiences working at least one month at a fixed-height workstation with a similar period at electric height-adjustable workstations."

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UGS Introduces NX(TM) Human Modeling | newratings.com

"New Software Application Enables Seamless Product Development Workflows; Provides Enhanced Support of Lean Design and Design for Six Sigma Initiatives

UGS, a leading global provider of product lifecycle management (PLM) software and services, today announced NX(TM) Human Modeling, which allows users to build virtual product design environments with digital humans to simulate ergonomics and conduct posture positioning. "

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Guardian Unlimited | World Latest | OSHA Chief to Depart Labor Department Post

John Henshaw, the assistant labor secretary overseeing the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, is departing at the end of the month, the Labor Department said Wednesday. Henshaw, former director of environment, safety and health for St. Louis chemical company Astaris LLC, has held the job since 2001. The agency sets and enforces U.S. workplace safety and health standards. Labor Secretary Elaine Chao praised Henshaw for his leadership, great wisdom and sincere concern for the safety and health of America's workers. Injury and illness rates at work sites fell during Henshaw's tenure.

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NCR - Scientific Games Selects NCR to Develop User Interface for Race Wagering Terminals

"NCR Corporation (NYSE: NCR) and Scientific Games Corporation (Nasdaq: SGMS) announced that NCR�s human factors consultants will develop the next-generation user interface for Scientific Games - self-service and teller-operated terminals used for pari-mutuel race wagering.

Scientific Games Racing, a division of Scientific Games Corporation, has provided totalisator systems - the complex hardware and software systems that accept wagers, calculate odds and payouts and process wagering pools - for more than fifty years. Scientific Games Racing's Quantum System, introduced in late 2003, ushered in a new environment in race wagering where patrons can use any network-enabled device to place wagers.

"NCR is the global leader in self-checkouts, ATMs and kiosks, where the user interface can make or break the consumer experience," said Scientific Games Racing President Brooks Pierce. "Tapping NCR's expertise will help us ensure that Scientific Games" terminals are as intuitive and easy-to-use as possible in an environment where every second counts.

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Occupational Hazards - Safe at Home?

"In today's work force, employers should be happy to know that they can continue to depend on a mature and experienced pool of employees. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, workers 55 and older represent the fastest growing segment of the work force, rising to 22.7 million in May of this year. This number is up from 20.7 million in 2002."

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Study Finds Patterns in Web Site User Motivations and Questions - Computerworld

" At the recent User Interface 9 conference in Boston, User Interface Engineering (UIE) previewed some groundbreaking research into the real questions that motivate people when they come to a Web site. The company studied over 3,000 posts on discussion forums about chronic neurological illnesses and discovered distinct patterns -- patterns that also appeared when they examined financial and other types of forums. "

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