The influence of the spatial separation of control elements on the workload for mobile information systems

Abstract

Mobile information systems (MIS) are finding their way into private and business every-day activities. There are also increased attempts to establish MIS for on-site activities in industrial facilities. Industrial environments, however, place significantly higher demands on mobile user interfaces than office or home environments. Common interaction styles are often unsuitable for this domain. MIS comprising specialized configurations like wearable systems might overcome current limitations. Wearable systems make it possible to arrange system components in the immediate environment of the user's body in order to create an ergonomic and intuitive user interface. However, the use of distributed, body-worn user interfaces, and in particular separation of input and output devices, might increase the workload for the user. This study examines the extent to which the separation of input and output devices affects the workload for wearable MIS. Three interaction styles in two different configurations are investigated with four different measures to determine the workload covering both objective and subjective indicators. This investigation shows that there is no significant increase of workload in general. However, the measurement of the heart rate variability revealed subtle but significant differences between the two configurations, particularly for one interaction style. These findings indicate that physiological measures can provide more detailed and subtle information about additional workload and its source than other measures.

Challenges of using mobile devices in process industry

“…In cases where the use of mobile devices have been studied, this work has mainly centered on designing and implementing wearable and embodied computing systems [9,2,8,6]. These types of systems include for example wrist computers or head-mounted screens, which are not commonly used in industrial settings at present.…”