Citation

Davis J, Larkin G, Oie K, Paul V. Eye Auto 2009; 2009: 18.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2009, Detroit Institute of Ophthalmology)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: Local Area Awareness (LAA) in a military operational environment, analogous to the concept of Situation Awareness (SA) (Endsley & Garland, 2000), is a key construct in achieving secure mobility - defined as the capability of the Soldier-system to traverse terrain in a manner that meets mission demands while sustaining a real-time understanding of the environment local to one's vehicle and platoon (McDowell et. al., 2009). As technology advances, automated systems are being integrated into vehicle design with the intention to, among other things, facilitate greater SA and LAA - e.g., adaptive cruise control (Ioannou & Chien, 1993) and semi-autonomous driving systems (Davis et al., 2008). With the addition of auto- mated systems to assist with primary driving functions, the driver's task loading is augment in way that lends itself to a more supervisory role, as opposed to that of a vehicle operator. In this case, the driver's primary function is to monitor operation of the semi-autonomous driving system and monitor the local environment for objects critical to the completion of the mission. In addition, emerging network centric capabilities and technologies provide operators with a possibly more efficient means of communicating information regarding their local environment. This abstract outlines a threat reporting paradigm that provides a naturalistic means of embedding LAA assessments into secure mobility tasks.

METHODS: The paradigm for embedded LAA assessments was analyzed in the context of a semi-autonomous driving task. While traversing a simulated environment, participants were tasked with observing and reporting key features of threats in their environment using a Graphic User Interface (GUI). For each report participants pressed a button identifying the: (1) beginning of a report; (2) type, (3) quantity and (4) location of the threat; and (5) the completion of a report. Timing and accuracy data was collected for each (button press). Vehicle motion was created using a 6-DOF ride motion platform.


RESULTS: Preliminary analysis (n = 4) on the time course of the entire report indicated differential temporal components associated with the operator's ability to identify key features of the threats. For example, participants generally identified the relative location first, type second and quantity last. The paradigm also revealed differences in the participant's ability to discriminate between specific aspects of threats identified i.e., participants identified the type and quantity for soldiers and insurgents faster than for civilians (~1 second). Data collection is ongoing and is expected to be done for an N of 20.

CONCLUSIONS: The threat reporting paradigm GUI provided a naturalistic means of assessing aspects of LAA within a secure mobility task. The paradigm offered a streamlined data collection process that clearly delineated the boundaries within report parameters and provided a means through which to standardize reports and associated measures, such as response time and accuracy. This research aims to understand LAA in operational environments and apply rigorous and systematic analytical techniques to better inform system design.