Emerging Needs and Opportunities for Human Factors Research (1995) / Chapter Skim
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Executive Summary
Executive Summary
Pages 1-10
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Technology has also advanced rapidly, and both the national and world situations have changed in significant and remarkable ways. Some of these changes create new challenges and opportunities for human factors research.
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From page 2... ...
Productivity is also believed to be causally linked to standard of living, so increasing productivity globally is seen as the best hope for improving living conditions worldwide. Human factors researchers have given considerable attention to how to improve human performance in the workplace and thereby increase individual productivity; they have put relatively little effort into determining how individual productivity relates to the productivity of the groups, organizations, or industries in which the individuals' work is done.
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Other opportunities for human factors research in this area include evaluating technologically innovative approaches to education and training, applying user-centered design principles to educational and training systems, developing approaches to support lifelong learning within work settings, and anticipating technologyinduced changes in job-skill requirements and their implications for educational and training needs. EMPLOYMENT AND DISABILITIES The population of people with one or another type of disability is large.
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Other challenges include developing effective memory aids for helping people to take medicines in proper dosages on schedule; improving the interpretability of labels, warnings, and instructions on medicines and health care devices that are intended to be used by nonprofessionals; developing and evaluating practical ways to train people in using such devices, and devising ways to convey health care and health maintenance to consumers generally. ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE The topic of detrimental environmental change is not usually associated with human factors research but is included in this report because it is a serious national and international problem that has elements that deserve attention from human factors researchers.
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Other challenges include helping to make mass public transportation a more attractive alternative to private automobiles for transport in urban areas; improving, from a human factors perspective, approaches to recycling and waste management, including procedures for handling radioactive and toxic wastes; and increasing accessibility of information in environmental databases to users and potential users of that information. COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGY AND TELENETWORKING Since the establishment of the first computer networks, network technology has advanced rapidly.
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Availability does not necessarily mean ready accessibility, however, and users, or potential users, of information that is available often experience frustration in locating, accessing, and interpreting the information they want. Any effort to make information more accessible to people who need or want to use it -- including many people who are not technically trained or oriented -- must devote attention to a variety of human factors issues relating to the ways in which people might interface with information repositories and tools that are intended to facilitate finding, using, and conveying information.
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Jobs have always changed over time as new technologies have been introduced in the workplace, but the rate of change has accelerated considerably in the recent past with the pervasive infusion of computer-based technologies. Human factors researchers must devote more attention to the introduction and use of new technologies in the workplace.
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There are, however, many remaining needs and opportunities for human factors research, especially in view of the ever-increasing technical complexity of vehicles and transportation systems. An example of a problem relating to driving safety that has received some attention but that needs further research is the dependence of driving performance on dynamic visual acuity.
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Efforts to develop additional and more powerful aids to intellectual work will undoubtedly continue for the foreseeable future. Human factors research is needed to evaluate the effectiveness of such aids, to provide -- through task analyses -- a better understanding of what further aids would be useful, and to participate in the design, implementation, and iterative improvement of such aids.
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From page 10... ...
developing a better understanding of why people often fail to use aids that could improve the performance of their jobs. CONCLUSION The needs and opportunities for research discussed in this report are considered by the Committee on Human Factors to be among the more important challenges to the human factors research community for the immediate future.
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