A situation awareness interface for a bi-wheeled industrial hovercraft: design, development and evaluation

The intention of this thesis is to develop a prototype interface that enables an operator to control a bi-wheeled industrial hovercraft that will work within a fusion power plant if the automation system fails. This fusion power plant is part of the ITER project a conjoint effort of various industrialized countries to develop cleaner sources of energy. The development of the interface prototype will be based on situation awareness concepts, which provide a means to understand how human operators perceive the world around, then process that information and make decisions based on the knowledge that they already have and the projected knowledge of the reactions that will occur in the world in response to the actions the operator makes. Two major situation awareness methods will be used, GDTA as a means to discover the requirements the interface needs to solve, and SAGAT to conduct the evaluation on the three interfaces. This technique can isolate the differences an operator has in situation awareness when presented with relevant information given by each of the three interfaces that were built for this thesis. Where the first interface presents the information within the operator’s focal point of view in a pictorial style, the second interface shows the same information within the same point of view has the first interface but only shows it in a textual manner. While the third interface shows the relevant information in the operator’s peripheral field of view. Also SAGAT can provide insight on the question to know if providing the operator with feed-forward information about the stoppage distances of the bi-wheeled industrial hovercraft has any effect on the operator’s decision making.

Integrating eye tracking in virtual reality for stroke rehabilitation

This thesis reports on research done for the integration of eye tracking technology into virtual reality environments, with the goal of using it in rehabilitation of patients who suffered from stroke. For the last few years, eye tracking has been a focus on medical research, used as an assistive tool  to help people with disabilities interact with new technologies  and as an assessment tool  to track the eye gaze during computer interactions. However, tracking more complex gaze behaviors and relating them to motor deficits in people with disabilities is an area that has not been fully explored, therefore it became the focal point of this research. During the research, two exploratory studies were performed in which eye tracking technology was integrated in the context of a newly created virtual reality task to assess the impact of stroke. Using an eye tracking device and a custom virtual task, the system developed is able to monitor the eye gaze pattern changes over time in patients with stroke, as well as allowing their eye gaze to function as an input for the task. Based on neuroscientific hypotheses of upper limb motor control, the studies aimed at verifying the differences in gaze patterns during the observation and execution of the virtual goal-oriented task in stroke patients (N=10), and also to assess normal gaze behavior in healthy participants (N=20). Results were found consistent and supported the hypotheses formulated, showing that eye gaze could be used as a valid assessment tool on these patients. However, the findings of this first exploratory approach are limited in order to fully understand the effect of stroke on eye gaze behavior. Therefore, a novel model-driven paradigm is proposed to further understand the relation between the neuronal mechanisms underlying goal-oriented actions and eye gaze behavior.