A forthcoming chapter on how sharp end practice bridges gaps to create resilience focused on health care.
What research is needed to advance patient safety? Research to help tame complexity. See a forthcoming handbook chapter to appear in Handbook of Human Factors in Health Care: Taming Complexity pdf
Contributor to "Organization at the Limit: NASA and the Columbia Disaster" (Blackwell) which provides lessons for all organziations. Download the chapter -- Creating Foresight: Lessons for Enhancing Resilience from Columbia:
creating foresight pdf
Analysis of a medication misadministration and how it reveals generic patterns in collaborative distributed work. In particular the study highlights the role of cross checks in resilience and safety. The study appeared in a special issue of IEEE SMC Part A in November 2004. analysis of a misadministration pdf
New synthesis of key aspects of team coordination. Joint activity depends on mutual predictability of the participants’ attitudes and actions which is based on common ground—pertinent knowledge, beliefs and assumptions that are shared among the involved parties. Joint activity assumes a basic compact, which is an agreement (often tacit) to facilitate coordination and prevent its breakdown. One aspect of the Basic Compact is the commitment to some degree of aligning multiple goals. A second aspect is that all parties are expected to bear their portion of the responsibility to establish and sustain common ground and to repair it as needed. Joint Activity pdf
These concepts are applied to human-automation team work as 10 Challenges in Ten Challenges pdf
Cognitive engineers face the same challenges in designing systems that users confront in working the tasks that the systems are intended to aid. A guide to overcome reductive biases in design. CTW00 pdf
Why is recognizing event patterns amazing? A model of events/expectations event model pdf
As hospitals across the United States develop policies to prevent worker fatigue and ensure patient safety, a study at Ohio State University has identified key strategies that might make the job easier. Culled from high-risk environments as diverse as a railroad dispatch center and the NASA Johnson Space Center, the strategies address the most critical time during any workday -- the shift change -- when incoming and outgoing workers have to exchange information and hand-off important duties. handoffs in health care pdf
Press items include Business First pdf press release pdf
A study of how a concept for representing order of magnitude aids comprhension of the decibel scale. decibel scale pdf
Envisioning Human-Robot Coordination for first responders and other critical tasks.
Introduces robots as a means for intent at a distance: Envisioning HRC IEEE pdf
See flash illustration of concepts below (click black dots; rollover red dots):
Introduces Remote perception problem and new concepts for understanding a remote environment through a robot's sensors: HRC and Remote Perception link
Latest paper Keyhole in HRI pdf
Covers work by Martin Voshel, Magnus Feil, James Tittle, A. Roesler, David Tinapple, and David Woods.
Primer material on the 'New Look' at error and how complex systems fail:
primer text pdf primer graphics pdf Handbook1 chapter pdf
Reactions to Failure:
error as information pdf Fundamental Surprise pdf
Resilience:
Breakdowns in adaptation pdf Bridging Gaps pdf See 'Moving Forward from Error' at this site.
More on the New Look in the Patient Safety Movement in Health Care:
Future of Patient Safety pdf what is error? pdf See the "The Tale of Two Stories" entry.
Also see: The Pexis e-course on error
Behind the label 'Human Error'
all at this site.
For additional results see:
VA Gaps Center web site
Emily Patterson web site
News item on bar coding studies
Universityof Chicago Cognitive technologies Lab site
For list of papers see: error papers
The modified Unit Marking Procedure or m-UMP is described as a means to discover the events practitioners find meaningful in dynamic data streams. The method is illustrated by results from a simulation study of anesthesiologists vital signs monitoring m-UMP pdf
Mapping the variations on human-centered design; plus a version of the un-Fitts list! Human-centered? pdf
An approach to R&D that replaces the discredited 'pipeline' model with synchronized cycles. The result is a guide for management.
"Balancing Practice-Centered Research and Design." by D.D. Woods and K. Christoffersen. In M. McNeese and M. A. Vidulich (editors), Cognitive Systems Engineering in Military Aviation Domains. Wright-Patterson AFB, OH: Human Systems Information Analysis Center, 2002, p. 121-136.
The chapter is based on Woods' plenary address at the International Ergonomic Association congress in 2000, "Complementarity and Synchronization as Strategies for Practice-Centered Research and Design." Multi-media animations from this talk provide dynamic illustrations of the chapter figures (see also part 3 of a Topic Landscape on Studying Cognitive Work in Context Facilitating Insight html
To see the approach in action on the topic of human-robot-interaction see the paper: Human-Robot Coordination pdf
Paper introduces thinking about designs at the 3 levels of understanding, usefulness and usability in parallel. Designs are models of the field of practice (understanding level), hypotheses about what would be useful in the future (usefulness level) and objects to be realized (usability level). Designs are hypotheses pdf
For an animation of the concept see parallel levels in design mov