Neuroergonomics for human-centered technological contexts

Barresi, Giacinto

Abstract

Enabling technologies constitute key milestones for humankind, expanding the capabilities of individuals and societies. Such a disruptive impact can also shape the perspective of any users beyond their own mind, body, and environment. For instance, the pervasive adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions is already radically transforming our skills and our settings. Particularly, embodied AIs can help us by means of robots and smart environments in multiple situations through interactions based on user interfaces and feedback powered by a progressively more and more refined computational modelling of our intentions and conditions in a specific context. Indeed, it is crucially important to enable a machine to correctly depict a setting as a system including itself, a space, and people whose skills, limitations, needs, and goals should define the ongoing tasks within the context. Interestingly, ergonomics provides effective interdisciplinary strategies to face such a challenge, investigating how a human being interacts with other elements of a system (a technological context, in the mentioned cases). Simultaneously, this discipline also has the scope of improving the well-being of the person and the performance of the system itself. Each (physical, cognitive, organizational) branch of ergonomics offers valuable methodologies for studying the space where human-technology interactions happen and show their effects. In particular, this manuscript will focus on the contributions of neuroergonomics, the discipline investigating human factors according to neuroscientific methods. Such an approach can exploit rich data collected, for instance, by means of wearable devices in ecologically valid contexts based on physical and digital (and phygital) spaces populated by humans and smart machines, making the design of the latter truly centered on the person.

• Online Publication Date: Dec 10, 2024
• Publication Date: 2024
• Deposit Date: Dec 10, 2024
• Pages: 61-85
• Series Title: Human Perspectives in Health Sciences and Technology
• Book Title: Digital Environments and Human Relations
• ISBN: 9783031769603
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-76961-0_4
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/13520361
• Additional Information: First Online: 10 December 2024