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The ISIS lab is uniquely equipped to collect a variety of performance measures to assess the crew's activities in the cockpit. Each participant is fitted with a cap, equipped with a partly silvered mirror that directs a harmless (invisible) infrared beam at the participant's left eye. The beam's reflectance pattern is sampled at a rate of 60 Hz, allowing for real-time measurement of the participant's gaze location and gaze duration. In this way, the information acquisition activities of the participants can be inferred in real-time. Eye movement recording data are combined with an assortment of objective measures, such as switch throws and keyboard presses, to yield a comprehensive "picture" of a crewmember's nominal information processing activities both when monitoring instruments and when attempting to resolve a simulated systems failure, such as a cooling problem or engine malfunction. In addition, participants complete questionnaires to indicate their situational awareness and workload.

The ISIS lab is currently helping evaluate the proposed display upgrades scheduled to be implemented in the Space Shuttle in 2005. The upgraded displays are intended to reduce the crew's workload while improving their performance and situational awareness. This upgrade is important because management of systems on the Space Shuttle is difficult and labor-intensive, which can pose a risk to crew safety and mission success. The evaluation will also allow us to determine the extent to which our human-centered performance measures (in particular, the eye-movement recordings) can quantify the changes in information acquisition and information processing activities brought on by display upgrades.

In addition to supporting the Space Shuttle, the ISIS lab also provides the means for developing and evaluating new concepts for next-generation spacecraft. For example, machine-based vehicle health management systems have advanced to the point where they can automatically monitor sensor data, detect off-nominal trends, diagnose systems malfunctions, and even work fault management procedures. These systems hold great promise for enhancing crew safety and mission success in next-generation manned space vehicles. However, infusing these technologies will transform fault management from the human-centered activity it is today to a cooperative venture between humans and intelligent fault management agents.

Developing and validating an operational concept for cooperative fault management poses serious human factors and human/system design challenges, including:

determining which duties should be controlled by the crew versus the computer system,
specifying how the allocation of those duties should be shifted during different phases of flight,
developing the appropriate human-computer interface so that humans and machines assist each other rather than confuse each other.

A key goal of the ISIS lab is to resolve these challenges by developing, testing, and evaluating operational concepts for cooperative human/machine fault management during dynamic phases of flight.