Human vs Machine: Situational Awareness

“Our working Environment critically impacts on our ability to do work. How we adapt our workers to the environment, or make changes to our interaction with the environment is critical to our success.” Dr Anthony Walker

How do we adapt our workers to the environment, or make changes to our interaction with the environment, when that environment is a dynamic host of changing variables?

Naturally we are all aware of our immediate environment. However, when our environment begins to change rapidly our singular perception of that environment may not be enough to comprehend the rapid succession of changes and how to interact with them.

In some environments there are also events that are well outside our natural ability to comprehend, such as the effect of heat and elevated heart rate, As Dr Walker illustrated in his article How safe is safe for workers in extreme environments?

In hostile environments such as these described in Dr Walkers article, teams of operators in hostile environments rely on Situational Awareness operating procedures, which are often visual observation and verbal reporting, to observe and collectively comprehend the changing environmental elements to actively process how to handle them as a group.

But how does operator decreased cognitive ability impact the group’s ability to process and comprehend their changing environment? And how does the operators command structure account for a decreased comprehension of the immediate surrounding, let alone the entire area of operation?

In short, Traditional Situation Awareness operating procedures fall short, at only being able to monitor what is seen, what is comprehended and what is reported by the individuals that make up the operational group, with a commander making the best call with the information at hand, and individuals reacting to their immediate surroundings within the bounds of the commanders’ intent.

From a Technology Perspective, This is where distributed systems and edge computing comes into its own, with the ability for nodes within a distributed system to perform computation of a continuous steam of data at the data point and in parallel, not only reporting on the status of changes to environmental variables, but also amalgamating to form an informed analysis of much more than the human comprehensible and seen elements.

But how do distributed systems and edge computing fit into the operational procedures of a hostile environment?

If Situational Awareness is the ability to perceive the environmental elements and events with respect to time and space, the comprehension of their meaning, and the projection of their status after some variable has changed. Then the enhancement of Situational Awareness with distributed and edge computing must conform to how we perceive the environment.

This is where Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) design couples edge compute Information processing into visual, audio and tactile cue to enhances our innate Human ability to comprehend these queues faster than streams of data on a screen.

At Ion Systems, we develop distributed edge systems that gather and analyse data in real time to enhance Situation Awareness of operators in hostile environments.

Still to come… What does a Distributed edge system look like?