What's unusual in online disease outbreak news?

Background: Accurate and timely detection of public health events of international concern is necessary to help support risk assessment and response and save lives. Novel event-based methods that use the World Wide Web as a signal source offer potential to extend health surveillance into areas where traditional indicator networks are lacking. In this paper we address the issue of systematically evaluating online health news to support automatic alerting using daily disease-country counts text mined from real world data using BioCaster. For 18 data sets produced by BioCaster, we compare 5 aberration detection algorithms (EARS C2, C3, W2, F-statistic and EWMA) for performance against expert moderated ProMED-mail postings. Results: We report sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value (PPV), negative predictive value (NPV), mean alerts/100 days and F1, at 95% confidence interval (CI) for 287 ProMED-mail postings on 18 outbreaks across 14 countries over a 366 day period. Results indicate that W2 had the best F1 with a slight benefit for day of week effect over C2. In drill down analysis we indicate issues arising from the granular choice of country-level modeling, sudden drops in reporting due to day of week effects and reporting bias. Automatic alerting has been implemented in BioCaster available from http://born.nii.ac.jp. Conclusions: Online health news alerts have the potential to enhance manual analytical methods by increasing throughput, timeliness and detection rates. Systematic evaluation of health news aberrations is necessary to push forward our understanding of the complex relationship between news report volumes and case numbers and to select the best performing features and algorithms

Experimental evaluation of candidate graphical microburst alert displays

A piloted flight simulator experiment was conducted to evaluate issues related to the display of microburst alerts on electronic cockpit instrumentation. Issues addressed include display clarity, usefulness of multilevel microburst intensity information, and whether information from multiple sensors should be presented separately or 'fused' into combined alerts. Nine active airline pilots of 'glass cockpit' aircraft participated in the study. Microburst alerts presented on a moving map display were found to be visually clear and useful to pilots. Also, multilevel intensity information coded by colors or patterns was found to be important for decision making purposes. Pilot opinion was mixed on whether to 'fuse' data from multiple sensors, and some resulting design tradeoffs were identified. The positional information included in the graphical alert presentation was found useful by the pilots for planning lateral missed approach maneuvers, but may result in deviations which could interfere with normal airport operations. A number of flight crew training issues were also identified

A review of human factors principles for the design and implementation of medication safety alerts in clinical information systems.

The objective of this review is to describe the implementation of human factors principles for the design of alerts in clinical information systems. First, we conduct a review of alarm systems to identify human factors principles that are employed in the design and implementation of alerts. Second, we review the medical informatics literature to provide examples of the implementation of human factors principles in current clinical information systems using alerts to provide medication decision support. Last, we suggest actionable recommendations for delivering effective clinical decision support using alerts. A review of studies from the medical informatics literature suggests that many basic human factors principles are not followed, possibly contributing to the lack of acceptance of alerts in clinical information systems. We evaluate the limitations of current alerting philosophies and provide recommendations for improving acceptance of alerts by incorporating human factors principles in their design

Study to determine potential flight applications and human factors design guidelines for voice recognition and synthesis systems

A study was conducted to determine potential commercial aircraft flight deck applications and implementation guidelines for voice recognition and synthesis. At first, a survey of voice recognition and synthesis technology was undertaken to develop a working knowledge base. Then, numerous potential aircraft and simulator flight deck voice applications were identified and each proposed application was rated on a number of criteria in order to achieve an overall payoff rating. The potential voice recognition applications fell into five general categories: programming, interrogation, data entry, switch and mode selection, and continuous/time-critical action control. The ratings of the first three categories showed the most promise of being beneficial to flight deck operations. Possible applications of voice synthesis systems were categorized as automatic or pilot selectable and many were rated as being potentially beneficial. In addition, voice system implementation guidelines and pertinent performance criteria are proposed. Finally, the findings of this study are compared with those made in a recent NASA study of a 1995 transport concept

Static and dynamic measures of human brain connectivity predict complementary aspects of human cognitive performance

In cognitive network neuroscience, the connectivity and community structure of the brain network is related to cognition. Much of this research has focused on two measures of connectivity - modularity and flexibility - which frequently have been examined in isolation. By using resting state fMRI data from 52 young adults, we investigate the relationship between modularity, flexibility and performance on cognitive tasks. We show that flexibility and modularity are highly negatively correlated. However, we also demonstrate that flexibility and modularity make unique contributions to explain task performance, with modularity predicting performance for simple tasks and flexibility predicting performance on complex tasks that require cognitive control and executive functioning. The theory and results presented here allow for stronger links between measures of brain network connectivity and cognitive processes.Comment: 37 pages; 7 figure

Best Practices for Evaluating Flight Deck Interfaces for Transport Category Aircraft with Particular Relevance to Issues of Attention, Awareness, and Understanding CAST SE-210 Output 2 Report 6 of 6

Attention, awareness, and understanding of the flight crew are a critical contributor to safety and the flight deck plays a critical role in supporting these cognitive functions. Changes to the flight deck need to be evaluated for whether the changed device provides adequate support for these functions. This report describes a set of diverse evaluation methods. The report recommends designing the interface-evaluation to span the phases of the device development, from early to late, and it provides methods appropriate at each phase. It describes the various ways in which an interface or interface component can fail to support awareness as potential issues to be assessed in evaluation. It summarizes appropriate methods to evaluate different issues concerning inadequate support for these functions, throughout the phases of development

Airborne derivation of microburst alerts from ground-based Terminal Doppler Weather Radar information: A flight evaluation

An element of the NASA/FAA windshear program is the integration of ground-based microburst information on the flight deck, to support airborne windshear alerting and microburst avoidance. NASA conducted a windshear flight test program in the summer of 1991 during which airborne processing of Terminal Doppler Weather Radar (TDWR) data was used to derive microburst alerts. Microburst information was extracted from TDWR, transmitted to a NASA Boeing 737 in flight via data link, and processed to estimate the windshear hazard level (F-factor) that would be experienced by the aircraft in each microburst. The microburst location and F-factor were used to derive a situation display and alerts. The situation display was successfully used to maneuver the aircraft for microburst penetrations, during which atmospheric 'truth' measurements were made. A total of 19 penetrations were made of TDWR-reported microburst locations, resulting in 18 airborne microburst alerts from the TDWR data and two microburst alerts from the airborne reactive windshear detection system. The primary factors affecting alerting performance were spatial offset of the flight path from the region of strongest shear, differences in TDWR measurement altitude and airplane penetration altitude, and variations in microburst outflow profiles. Predicted and measured F-factors agreed well in penetrations near microburst cores. Although improvements in airborne and ground processing of the TDWR measurements would be required to support an airborne executive-level alerting protocol, the practicality of airborne utilization of TDWR data link data has been demonstrated

Aerospace medicine and Biology: A continuing bibliography with indexes, supplement 177

This bibliography lists 112 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in January 1978

The role of voice technology in advanced helicopter cockpits

The status of voice output and voice recognition technology in relation to helicopter cockpit applications is described. The maturing of this technology provides many opportunities for new approaches to crew workload reduction. The helicopter operating environment, potential application areas, and the impact on advanced cockpit design are discussed