Improvements in health care and quality of life in recent years have led to a marked aging of the world's population, especially in well-developed regions. In the near future, this problem will spread to developing countries. The growing need to promote the health and function of aging workers not only presents new challenges, but also provides exciting new opportunities.
The chapters in this book examine methods for diagnosing and evaluating work ability/employability in response to the changing capacity of employment. They set out the issues addressed by occupational health professionals to improve the work ability of elderly employees, and discuss measures to promote their employment. The book derives from a Conference on Aging and Work, held in Japan in September 2001. It will be of particular interest to professionals and students in the fields of occupational health, ergonomics, mechanical engineering, work physiology and industrial psychology.

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What does the collapse of sub-prime lending have in common with a broken jackscrew in an airliner's tailplane? Or the oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico with the burn-up of Space Shuttle Columbia? These were systems that drifted into failure. While pursuing success in a dynamic, complex environment with limited resources and multiple goal conflicts, a succession of small, everyday decisions eventually produced breakdowns on a massive scale. We have trouble grasping the complexity and normality that gives rise to such large events. We hunt for broken parts, fixable properties, people we can hold accountable. Our analyses of complex system breakdowns remain depressingly linear, depressingly componential - imprisoned in the space of ideas once defined by Newton and Descartes. The growth of complexity in society has outpaced our understanding of how complex systems work and fail. Our technologies have gotten ahead of our theories. We are able to build things - deep-sea oil rigs, jackscrews, collateralized debt obligations - whose properties we understand in isolation. But in competitive, regulated societies, their connections proliferate, their interactions and interdependencies multiply, their complexities mushroom. This book explores complexity theory and systems thinking to understand better how complex systems drift into failure. It studies sensitive dependence on initial conditions, unruly technology, tipping points, diversity - and finds that failure emerges opportunistically, non-randomly, from the very webs of relationships that breed success and that are supposed to protect organizations from disaster. It develops a vocabulary that allows us to harness complexity and find new ways of managing drift.

This is the sixth edited volume of refereed contributions, from an international group of researchers and specialists. Volumes five and six comprise the edited proceedings of the Third International Conference on Engineering Psychology and Cognitive Ergonomics, organized by Cranfield College of Aeronautics, Edinburgh, Scotland, October 2000. The applications areas include aerospace and other transportation, medicine, human-computer interaction, process control, and training technology. Topics addressed include: the design of control and display systems; human perception, error, reliability, information processing, and performance modelling; mental workload; stress; automation; situation awareness; skill acquisition and retention; techniques for evaluating human-machine systems and the physiological correlates of performance. Both volumes will be useful to applied and occupational psychologists, instructors, instructional developers, equipment and systems designers, researchers, government regulatory personnel, human resource managers and selection specialists; also to senior pilots, air traffic control and aviation and ground transportation operations management.

This is the fifth edited volume of refereed contributions, from an international group of researchers and specialists. Volumes Five and Six comprise the edited proceedings of the third international conference on Engineering Psychology Cognitive Ergonomics, organized by Cranfield College of Aeronautics, Edinburgh, Scotland in October 2000. Volume Five concentrates on applications in the areas of transportation, medical ergonomics and training. Topics addressed include: the design of control and display systems; human perception, error, reliability, information processing, and performance modelling; mental workload; stress; automation; situation awareness; skill acquisition and retention; techniques for evaluating human-machine systems and the physiological correlates of performance. Both volumes will be useful to applied and occupational psychologists, instructors, instructional developers, equipment and system designers, researchers, government regulatory personnel, human resource managers and selection specialists; also to senior pilots, air traffic control and aviation and ground transportation operations management.

In The Human Factor, Kim Vicente coined the term 'Human-tech' to describe a more encompassing and ambitious approach to the study of Human-Technology Interaction (HTI) than is now evident in any of its participating disciplines, such as human factors, human-computer interaction, cognitive science and engineering, industrial design, informatics or applied psychology. Observing that the way forward is 'not by widgets alone,' Vicente's Human-tech approach addresses every level-physical, psychological, team, organizational, and political-at which technology impacts quality of life, identifies a human or societal need, and then tailors technology to what we know about human nature at that level. The Human Factor was written for a broad audience, in part to educate general readers beyond the HTI community about the need to think seriously about the tremendous impact that poorly designed technology can have, ranging from user frustration to the tragic loss of human life. The articles collected in this book provide much of the technical material behind the work that was presented in The Human Factor, and the commentaries by Alex Kirlik situate these articles in their broader historical, scientific and ethical context. This collection of articles and commentaries forms a set of recommendations for how HTI research ought to broaden both its perspective and its practical, even ethical, aspirations to meet the increasingly complicated challenges of designing technology to support human work, to improve quality of life, and to design the way will live with technology. As the first book both to integrate the theory and research underlying Human-tech, and to clearly delineate the scientific challenges and ethical responsibilities that await those who either design technology for human use, or design technology that influences or even structures the working or daily lives of others, Human-tech: Ethical and Scientific Foundations will appeal to the broad range of students and scholars in all of the HTI disciplines.

Although cognitive engineering has gained widespread acceptance as one of the most promising approaches to addressing and preventing difficulties with human-machine coordination and collaboration, it still meets with considerable skepticism and resistance in some of the industries that could benefit from its insights and recommendations. The challenge for cognitive engineers is to better understand the reasons underlying these reservations and to overcome them by demonstrating and communicating more effectively their concepts, approaches, and proposed solutions. To contribute to this goal, the current volume presents concrete examples of cognitive engineering research and design. It is an attempt to complement the already existing excellent literature on cognitive engineering in domains other than aviation and to introduce professionals and students in a variety of domains to this rather young discipline.
The editors of this book, and the authors whose work is included, subscribe to the need to evaluate work in context. Accepting new paradigms for the study of humans working in complex environments, they view the human as an asset--indeed a necessity--in human-machine systems and they accept and take advantage of variations in human behavior. In addition, they recognize that much or most error is the result of mismatches between human capabilities and the demands placed on those humans by the machines which they use in the environments in which they are placed. As a whole, this volume illustrates how far we've come in understanding the cognitive bases of human work in complex human-machine systems.

Providing a practical guide to the training and assessment of non-technical skills within high-risk industries, this book will be of direct interest to safety and training professionals working within aviation, healthcare, rail, maritime, and other high-risk industries. Currently, each of these industries are working to integrate non-technical skills into their training and certification processes, particularly in light of increasing international regulation in this area. However, there is no definitive guidance to assist practitioners within these areas with the design of effective non-technical skills training and assessment programs. This book sets out to fully meet this need. It has been designed as a practically focussed companion to the 2008 book Safety at the Sharp End by Flin, O'Connor and Crichton. While Safety at the Sharp End provides the definitive exploration of the need for non-technical skills training, and examines in detail the main components of non-technical skills as they relate to safe operations, the text does not focus on the "nuts and bolts" of designing training and assessment programs. To this end, Training and Assessing Non-Technical Skills: A Practical Guide provides an extension of this work and a fitting companion text.

Presents detailed focus on what a leader can do, regardless of the level of the leader. Covers remedies for barriers to enabling characteristics to shine. Discusses both quantitative and qualitative measures for the characteristics. Explores the why, what and how of learnable traits and characteristics of individuals-as-leaders.

This book is the fourth in the series and describes some of the most recent advances and examines emerging problems in engineering psychology and cognitive ergonomics. It bridges the gap between the academic theoreticians, who are developing models of human performance, and practitioners in the industrial sector, responsible for the design, development and testing of new equipment and working practices.

This book is the third in the series and describes some of the most recent advances and examines emerging problems in engineering psychology and cognitive ergonomics. It bridges the gap between the academic theoreticians, who are developing models of human performance, and practitioners in the industrial sector, responsible for the design, development and testing of new equipment and working practices.

Global competition is forcing reliability and other professionals to work closely during the product design and manufacturing phase. Because of this collaboration, reliability, usability, and quality principles are being applied across many diverse sectors of the economy. This book offers the principles, methods, and procedures for these areas in one resource. This book brings together the areas of reliability, usability, and quality for those working in diverse areas to allow them to be exposed to activities that can help them perform their tasks more effectively. This is the only book that covers these areas together in this manner and written in such a way that no previous knowledge is required to understand it. The sources of the material presented are included in the reference section at the end of each chapter along with examples and solutions to test reader comprehension. Applied Reliability, Usability, and Quality for Engineers is useful to design, manufacturing, and systems engineers, as well as manufacturing managers, reliability, usability and, quality specialists. It can also be helpful to graduate, senior undergraduate students, and instructors.

Ergonomics Principles in Design: An Illustrated Fundamental Approach touches upon different ergonomic principles in design and then showcases with examples where and how they have been applied. Each chapter covers one aspect of design and emphasizes its application in the real world, such as the ergonomic design of the interface of a blood pressure monitor and the ergonomic interface of a moving ticket vending machine. Discusses all aspects of design from product, space, and communication. Includes many self-explanatory assignments for better understanding. Highlights practice sessions at the end of each chapter with design directions to help the readers. Demonstrates ergonomics principles with the help of real-life examples. Focusses on the application of ergonomic principles in design in the form of studio assignments. The text covers the application of ergonomic principles in diverse areas of design, like product, space, and communication in a single volume. It will serve as an ideal reference text for graduate students and professionals in the fields of ergonomics, human factors, occupational health and safety, and industrial and manufacturing engineering.

Most approaches that contribute to the design of life-critical systems almost only consider nominal situations where procedures can be developed and used to achieve satisfactory operations. These kinds of approaches lead to rigid ways of doing things and poorly address the needs for flexibility, especially when things go wrong. It is not a matter of human adaptation but of human systems integration (HSI) flexibility. HSI flexibility requires cross-fertilization of appropriate experiences combined with creativity. This book provides risk-management approaches and methods for combining prevention and design. Features: Discusses risk-management approaches and methods for combining prevention and design Examines a transdisciplinary approach to risk management in design and operations of safer life-critical systems Proposes an approach of work analysis during design, which enables design teams to consider HSI issues early enough to fix organizational problems upstream Teaches the combination of prevention and design for safety management This book gathers and analyzes relevant field data to rationalize human and systems activity in various life-critical environments and workplaces, in a systemic manner, and in a variety of safety domains (e.g., aviation, road, navy, manufacturing, hospital, transportation, defense, sport). It further formalizes and analyzes risk-taking experience, expertise, stories about critical events, and scientific and professional literature data to help engineering designers, managers, and health and safety specialists. The text is primarily written for graduate students and professionals working in the fields of occupational health and safety, ergonomics, human factors, cognitive engineering, and human-system integration.

This work gives a broad introductory overview of the topic of usability. Firstly, usability is defined and a framework for identifying different aspects of usability is given. The main principles for creating usable designs are expounded, followed by practical advice as to how to design usable products. The book then tackles the issue of usability evaluation - a series of evaluation methods are described, followed by practical advice as to how to conduct the evaluation.; The book draws on examples from software design and product design generally. This means whilst human-computer interaction HCI is a central issue in the book, other usability issues are also covered.

One of the greatest challenges in the occupational health and safety profession is the application of theory to actual workplace practice. The difference between how the workplace should be ideally designed and the limitations that occur in pre-existing facilities are often difficult to overcome. With examples from the service industry, heavy industry, agriculture, and the office, this text bridges these gaps between theory and practice by using case studies to illustrate sound ergonomic practices.
The Ergonomic Casebook is a resource that professionals and students can use as a guide for solutions to real-world ergonomic problems. Working examples from ergonomic programs in a variety of industries are included. Case studies describe methods for identifying ergonomic problems, and specific causes are reported. Recommended strategies for the elimination of identified stressors are indicated. Implemented strategies and evaluated results are discussed and explained.
Applications of this book are endless. Whether you are a health and safety professional with limited expertise in ergonomics or a student taking a health and safety course, you will gain extensive insight into ergonomic problem solving as a result of the case studies presented in The Ergonomic Casebook.

This book presents the proceedings of the 21st Congress of the International Ergonomics Association (IEA 2021), held online on June 13-18, 2021. By highlighting the latest theories and models, as well as cutting-edge technologies and applications, and by combining findings from a range of disciplines including engineering, design, robotics, healthcare, management, computer science, human biology and behavioral science, it provides researchers and practitioners alike with a comprehensive, timely guide on human factors and ergonomics. It also offers an excellent source of innovative ideas to stimulate future discussions and developments aimed at applying knowledge and techniques to optimize system performance, while at the same time promoting the health, safety and wellbeing of individuals. The proceedings include papers from researchers and practitioners, scientists and physicians, institutional leaders, managers and policy makers that contribute to constructing the Human Factors and Ergonomics approach across a variety of methodologies, domains and productive sectors. This volume includes papers addressing the following topics: Healthcare Ergonomics, Health and Safety, Musculoskeletal Disorders, HF/E Contribution to cope with Covid-19.

This book explains how accidents and high potential near-miss incidents are caused, and how to eliminate recurrences by effective accident investigation methods. It shows how to conduct an immediate and root cause analysis so that remedial measures can be taken to prevent a recurrence of similar events. The book shows how to apply the Logical Sequence Accident Investigation Method in the case studies presented. The book: Provides a practical guide to accident causes, investigation and prevention. Explains immediate and root causes in detail. Gives a number of problem-solving methods for the accident investigator to use. Introduces the Logical Sequence Accident Investigation Method. Provides a practical accident investigation evaluation system. The book discusses important topics including hazard identification and risk assessment, workplace health and safety, accident causation and prevention theories, the updated accident domino sequence, as well as safety management system standards and controls. The text is primarily written for professionals and graduate students in the fields of occupational health and safety, ergonomics and human factors engineering.

Key Selling Points The first book to showcase physical representations of data, and the first to discuss the creative process behind them. Approaches the topic from a multidisciplinary perspective, showcasing a range of creative approaches from computer science, data science, graphic design, art, craft, and architecture. The book is heavily visual and illustrates each project and the process of creating it via rich photos and sketches, which are accessible and inspiring for both enthusiasts and experts.

The Art of Safety Auditing: A Tutorial for Regulators provides the theory and practice of auditing safety management systems implemented by the companies in risk industries. With his extensive knowledge and experiences in quality and safety, Sasho Andonov provides the tools to fill the gap in regulatory auditing for safety management systems. The book explains in detail the overall process of auditing with emphasis on practical execution of audits by Safety Regulators in each State or International Organizations. This book presents real examples and outlines every aspect of regulations and oversight audits in high risk industries. FEATURES Offers all theoretical and practical aspects of safety audits Dedicated to regulatory bodies and companies in high risk industries Provides a holistic approach to auditing as part of regulatory oversight activities Discusses most common mistakes during audits and advices how to correct them Excellent tool for auditors and safety managers, but can be utilized in other industries

This book presents the proceedings of the 21st Congress of the International Ergonomics Association (IEA 2021), held online on June 13-18, 2021. By highlighting the latest theories and models, as well as cutting-edge technologies and applications, and by combining findings from a range of disciplines including engineering, design, robotics, healthcare, management, computer science, human biology and behavioral science, it provides researchers and practitioners alike with a comprehensive, timely guide on human factors and ergonomics. It also offers an excellent source of innovative ideas to stimulate future discussions and developments aimed at applying knowledge and techniques to optimize system performance, while at the same time promoting the health, safety and wellbeing of individuals. The proceedings include papers from researchers and practitioners, scientists and physicians, institutional leaders, managers and policy makers that contribute to constructing the Human Factors and Ergonomics approach across a variety of methodologies, domains and productive sectors. This volume includes papers addressing the following topics: Transport Ergonomics and Human Factors, Practitioner Case Studies, Human Factors in Robotics, Manufacturing, Agriculture, HF/E in Supply Chain Design and Management, Aerospace, Building and Construction.

This book deals with two important technologies in human-computer interaction: computer generation of synthetic speech and computer recognition of human speech. It addresses the problems in generating speech with varying precision of articulation and how to convey moods and attitudes.

After a quick survey of the famous pioneers of human movement analysis and the actual needs in different domains, this book presents the main types of systems available on the market (with the pros and cons), and then details the most widely used: the optoelectronic systems using passive markers. The theoretical background for joint kinematics calculation is explained, specifying the international standardization for parameters reports. One chapter is dedicated to measurement errors and their management, followed by several applications, mostly in the clinical field.

This book presents the proceedings of the 21st Congress of the International Ergonomics Association (IEA 2021), held online on June 13-18, 2021. By highlighting the latest theories and models, as well as cutting-edge technologies and applications, and by combining findings from a range of disciplines including engineering, design, robotics, healthcare, management, computer science, human biology and behavioral science, it provides researchers and practitioners alike with a comprehensive, timely guide on human factors and ergonomics. It also offers an excellent source of innovative ideas to stimulate future discussions and developments aimed at applying knowledge and techniques to optimize system performance, while at the same time promoting the health, safety and wellbeing of individuals. The proceedings include papers from researchers and practitioners, scientists and physicians, institutional leaders, managers and policy makers that contribute to constructing the Human Factors and Ergonomics approach across a variety of methodologies, domains and productive sectors. This volume includes papers addressing the following topics: Activity Theories for Work Analysis and Design (ATWAD), Organisation design and management (ODAM), Ergonomic Work Analysis and Training (EWAT), Systems HF/E, HF/E Education and Professional Certification Development.

Industry underestimates the extent to which behaviour at work is influenced by the design of the working environment. Designing for Human Reliability argues that greater awareness of the contribution of design to human error can significantly enhance HSE performance and improve return on investment. Illustrated with many examples, Designing for Human Reliability explores why work systems are designed and implemented such that "design-induced human error" becomes more-or-less inevitable. McLeod demonstrates how well understood psychological processes can lead people to make decisions and to take actions that otherwise seem impossible to understand. Designing for Human Reliability sets out thirteen key elements to deliver the levels of human reliability expected to achieve the return on investment sought when decisions are made to invest in projects. And it demonstrates how investigation of the human contribution to incidents can be improved by focusing on what companies expected and intended when they chose to rely on human performance as a barrier, or control, against incidents.

This book explores the interplay of farm mechanization, human factors and climatic and other environmental uncertainty in agriculture, using an ergonomics based approach to discuss solutions to the traditionally acknowledged vulnerability of the sector. It converges contemporary research documentation, case studies and international standards on agricultural ergonomics, engineering anthropometry, human factors, basic occupational health services, safety management, human performance and system sustainability to provide a handy reference to students and professionals working to optimize agricultural output while balancing the rational utilization of labour in agricultural practices and human well-being.