Impact of Stress on Safety Critical Decisions

Most safety critical systems involve a human in the loop making critical decisions, often while being under stress. It is important to understand the impact of interface design on the users’ decision-making processes and decision performance when the users are under realistic conditions of operation. Our research is an experiment performed to analyze the effect of stress on various characteristics of human decision-making. The goal of the experiment is to use the results as a guide for interface design.

We worked on this project for 10 weeks under Professor Fatma Mili.  Our research brought some interesting results.  We hope to publish our paper and present it at a conference in the coming year.

The research and information that is being used to develop the program interface for the experiment and analyze its results are related to:

• Decision Support Systems (DSS): a method (in this case, an interface) that is used to convey information with which a user makes an informed decision
• Human Computer Interaction (HCI): the method in which a user controls the processes of a computer, and vice versa (computer influence)
• Safety Critical Systems (SCS): a computer, electronic or electromechanical system whose failure may cause injury or death to human beings

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