Blog

We are redesigning two spaces in the ISyE department. The first is a storage space where we will keep extra lab equipment. The second is a lab space where graduate students will be analyzing handwritten text (notes from professors from the past 30 years) and creating digital records of these texts. How will the illuminance need for these two spaces compare? 

Aircraft fuelers at the airport work out on the ramp near the airplanes. There are often jet engines running as well as aircraft taking off and landing nearby and it is very loud. Workers also wear ear protection, such as earplugs and headsets to protect their ears from the noise. However, due to these factors, the fuelers often do not hear the auditory alarm to indicate they need to shut off the fuel flow due to enhanced fire risk. What noise issue is causing this? 

Consider the Vee Process; we discussed often using this process in the design of high-risk systems. What makes high-risk system design unique from workplace efficiency/production issues or consumer product design? 

A factory assembly line is being designed. The location is a large open warehouse that does not contain any air conditioning or heating functionality due to its old age. Additionally, the high ceilings prevent the effectiveness of using any ceiling fans. However, workers must wear long pants and long sleeves, large gloves, ear protection, and eye protection while working. During what type of analysis would you uncover possible issues with the temperature, lighting, and physical layout of this assembly line? 

Engineers create a patient management system to be used in operating rooms; the purpose of the patient management system is to reduce human error in tasks such as medication errors, order of operations during surgery, and exposing patients to common allergens such as latex and penicillin. The system is installed in a hospital in Charlotte, NC. Under normal conditions, the system works well, but if physicians need to edit the patient details, they often have trouble making the edits correctly. In one procedure, a physician accidently put in the wrong weight when reprogramming the computer and nearly gave a patient a lethal dose of medication. From a systems perspective, what has most likely happened? 

Regarding timescales for various activities or actions, which of these activities has the longest timescale? 

Consider visual search & detection; do people always search a space in an organized manner? 

Accident prevention is a major goal of human factors engineering, but we rarely observe accidents directly. How do we analyze these events? 

As a result of _____________, the center of world banking shifted to New York City.

We discussed several types of analyses that are important when we are designing or redesigning a product/system. Analyzing how to distribute tasks between our human operators and any technology/automation by evaluating the basic functions that must be performed tends to happen in what type of analysis?