{"id":29765,"date":"2019-09-02T09:08:08","date_gmt":"2019-09-02T13:08:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/?p=29765"},"modified":"2019-09-09T04:39:05","modified_gmt":"2019-09-09T08:39:05","slug":"study-suggests-new-method-could-help-assess-a-workers-situational-awareness-while-multitasking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/2019\/09\/study-suggests-new-method-could-help-assess-a-workers-situational-awareness-while-multitasking\/","title":{"rendered":"Study suggests new method could help assess a worker&#8217;s situational awareness while multitasking"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From the University of Missouri-Columbia press release:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Jugglers are skilled at keeping several objects in motion at the same time using a combination of tossing motions and eye movement. As objects are added to a juggler&#8217;s routine, their gaze moves as the juggler tries to focus on all of the objects and avoid dropping one or two.<\/p>\n<p><strong>People who often multitask at work might feel like a juggler at times.<\/strong> In a work setting &#8212; such as an oil refinery &#8212; where a person needs to keep tabs on multiple gauges and systems to keep systems working properly, a change in a person&#8217;s eye movement could cause a mistake, and possibly cost a life. With the ever-increasing connectivity of today&#8217;s society, the demand for a real-time way to evaluate <strong>how well an employee understands their current situation<\/strong> &#8212; often called <strong>situational awareness<\/strong> &#8212; has become a <strong>paramount safety issue<\/strong> for employers, especially those in industrial and manufacturing industries. Researchers at the University of Missouri believe studying a person&#8217;s eyes could help with this.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;An employee with poor situational awareness will miss some critical things that happen in their work area,&#8221; said Jung Hyup Kim, an assistant professor of industrial and manufacturing systems engineering in the MU College of Engineering. &#8220;If I am tired, burdened by other things, or my workload is beyond what I can handle, my awareness will go down, and there is no way to measure that in real-time.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Researchers said the current method to evaluate a person&#8217;s situational awareness involves only asking questions; this is not enough. In the study, they created a simulated multitasking environment of an oil refinery control room. Participants had to monitor multiple gauges and other controls on a computer screen while simultaneously responding to unexpected events, such as alarms.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We found a <strong>relationship between situational awareness and self-terminating visual search<\/strong> &#8212; or once you find a solution, you end the search,&#8221; Kim said. &#8220;So, if a person has a good understanding about the situation, then they can directly target the cause of the problem in a short amount of time. But if they do not have good awareness, then they may spend a long time searching randomly for the cause.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Kim and Xiaonan Yang, a graduate student at MU, hope to test their model in a real-life environment to see if any changes are observed between that situation and their simulation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From the University of Missouri-Columbia press release: Jugglers are skilled at keeping several objects in motion at the same time using a combination of tossing motions and eye movement. As&#8230; <a class=\"read-more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/2019\/09\/study-suggests-new-method-could-help-assess-a-workers-situational-awareness-while-multitasking\/\">Read more &raquo;<\/a><!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":20824,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[179,18,198,12,103,102],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29765"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29765"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29765\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30038,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29765\/revisions\/30038"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20824"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}