The Human Response

High Velocity Human Factors are revolutionizing design for public safety applications.

When faced with a high stress situation, most people aren’t surprised when their hearts start pounding or their palms get sweaty.

However, most would probably be surprised to discover that they might find it difficult to form coherent sentences or even to speak at all when under stress. And they might even be a little offended to know that their thought patterns under stress likely resemble a reptile’s more than a human’s.

A scientific term often used to describe a high stress situation is “non-equilibrium.” It’s a state that public safety responders – including police, firefighters and other emergency personnel – find themselves in more than most.

The non-equilibrium state in the public safety arena can perhaps best be summed up in the words written by stress researchers Eduardo Salas and James Driskell more than a decade ago: “Emergency or crisis conditions occur suddenly and often unexpectedly, operators must make critical decisions under extreme stress, and the consequences of poor performance are immediate and catastrophic.”

Surprisingly, most technology – even in the public safety arena – has not been designed to account for an individual’s response in “non-equilibrium” situations. Instead, it has been designed based on research on their reactions under normal or “equilibrium” conditions. In fact, an entire area of research, called Human Factors Sciences, is focused on how to create technology that a “human agent” can operate easily under such “equilibrium” conditions. An example of such technology is the creation of the Windows operating system, which made computers much easier to operate than the existing DOS system.

But in the public safety community, first responders often need to operate technology under conditions that are anything but stable or normal. And their responses in these high stress, non-equilibrium situations can affect their ability to effectively operate the technology they use every day.

The importance of research that examines the impact of stress when operating technology is getting a lot more attention, thanks to the efforts of one man: Moin Rahman. As a Principal Scientist at Motorola’s Government and Public Safety sector, Rahman researches human performance in mission-critical domains such as law enforcement and firefighting at Motorola.

Rahman is referred to as the “Warrior Scholar” because he focuses on studying the human performance of police officers, firefighters and soldiers from a psychological standpoint during periods of intense action. As one would expect, the goal of this research is to influence the design of communications equipment for public safety responders.

The Impact of Stress on Human Performance

So why exactly do public safety officials have different technology needs than the average Joe consumer? To understand this, one has to understand a little bit about how a crisis affects an individual’s ability to use communications equipment.

Here’s just one example: In a high stress situation, individuals actually can lose the ability to use some portions of their brain. In non-stress situations, humans generally employ three levels of brain activity: the primitive or reptilian brain, the mammalian brain (the type of brain humans share with other intelligent mammals) and the neo-mammalian brain (which allows humans to complete more complex tasks than other mammals such as calculus or composing music). In many high stress situations, so-called “regressive” behavior occurs, where the two higher brains are almost completely inactive. This causes humans to respond very primitively, much like reptiles.

To compensate for the loss of high brain-level activity in high stress situations, individuals automatically “cut off as much information as possible and process only the most relevant information – if they can get it,” Rahman says. For instance, individuals in high stress situations might experience something called “cognitive tunneling,” where a person might see only certain things in his or her field of vision.

“The human body is marvelously designed to deal with both threat and challenge. However, while our mechanisms, like the effects of adrenaline, are in place, they can become excessive and impair performance,” says Dr. Michael Asken, a clinical and police psychologist and the author of MindSighting: Mental Toughness Skills for Police Officers in High Stress Situations.

So how does this relate to technology? Individuals in high stress situations may have trouble, for instance, processing all of the information normally presented on the dashboard display in their police cruisers. Or they may have trouble doing operations that require several steps.

Ideally, technology can be designed to account for such limitations during times of stress. For instance, in the future, a police cruiser might have a digital dashboard that would suppress irrelevant information – such as miles traveled – during a police chase and instead magnify information such as speed or mapping capabilities to facilitate response, explains Rahman.

“At one level, technology, say of sensors, that could detect and alert an officer to the presence of a metal object and, further, indicate that it is a weapon, would certainly provide an advantage,” says Asken. “At another level, technology that might monitor an officer’s performance state and provide cues to either relax or increase alertness and physical readiness can augment psychological skills. Imagination and creativity (and engineering) are the only limits.”

Designing Products that are Second Nature in their Operation

Motorola has integrated human response factors into the design of its public safety communications equipment for more than 25 years. For instance, Motorola was the first to locate the emergency button on its radios at the bottom of the antenna, making it easy for a police officer to find it, feel it, without even looking down in an emergency. Other key design features include an angled knob that is easier to operate with a gloved hand and the angled “bump” on the side of the radio for easier grip.

Motorola also ensures that the buttons controlling the most critical functions are highly accessible for public safety users. “Volume, push-to-talk and channel controls are the three most important features of a radio. In a Motorola radio, those three controls will never be demoted to a user tree,” says Mark Palmer, design integration manager of Human Factors Design Research and User Interface Design at Motorola and the man who heads Rahman’s research team at Motorola. “That means that under high stress situations, individuals don’t even have to think about how to access them. In essence, we give people information in a way in which they can process it.”

Motorola’s work in this area has resulted in one other key benefit for its customers: a reduction in user training costs. For instance, when Motorola set out to design Mission Critical radios for the European market, Motorola talked with a key customer to identify what the biggest potential obstacle was regarding the migration to the radios. Immediately, the customer responded: “Training.” With most new communications systems, this customer had to dedicate as many as two days to train his force on new equipment. With 35,000 on the force, that meant as many as 70,000 days of lost productivity. In contrast, the Mission Critical radios designed by Motorola tested very high on the usability scale, reducing the need for extensive training.

Taking Human Factors Research to a New Level

After realizing that very few researchers were focused at how high stress situations might adversely affect a person’s ability to operate technology, Rahman realized that the existing area of scientific study on human-machine interactions, Human Factors Sciences, needed to be expanded. Rahman took on the challenge and began pioneering a new area of research that focuses on how high stress situations affect a human’s interaction with technology. It’s called High Velocity Human Factors.

High Velocity Human Factors takes the concept of Human Factors Sciences to a new level. Instead of focusing the majority of its research on equilibrium situations, High Velocity Human Factors focuses its research on the human reaction in non-equilibrium situations. Its goal is to maximize the performance of individuals in high stress situations such as those often experienced by public safety users – unpredictable situations that involve high stakes, physical danger and incomplete information.

“HVHF can be particularly important in law enforcement, because in many ways and especially in dangerous and high stress situations, police work is reactive in nature, that is, action is in response to a threat,” says Asken. “Police officers do not initiate action until a subject has made a threatening gesture or produced a weapon. Reactive behavior is obviously slower than offensive action. Anything that can aid the quality of an appropriate response is welcome.”

Keeping Bad Design from Being Hazardous

As part of his efforts to get this new research area officially recognized, Rahman submitted a paper for peer review to the annual meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. In order to be accepted by the conference, submitted papers must contain ideas that are considered groundbreaking.

After being evaluated by a double-blind peer review group, Rahman’s paper was accepted for presentation in 2007. Since Rahman presented his ideas at the event a year ago, the recognition of the concept of High Velocity Human Factors has been gaining ground, and more research is being completed in this area. For public safety officials, increased research in the area not only means they will be able to do their jobs more effectively; it will also by extension, save more lives.

After all, in the world of the consumer, poor usability simply creates frustration. But in the public safety world, bad design is hazardous and can often be deadly. The goal of Rahman and the rest of the human factors design team at Motorola is to eliminate this hazard for good.

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