Assisted Focus and Decluttering of Situation Displays
Assisted Focus is a human factors and artificial intelligence solution to the common problem of information ambiguity and clutter on displays.
The solution consists of two parts:
- Heuristic automation to identify and prioritize objects of high interest
- Attention management to help users focus on the objects of interest without losing awareness of the situation
Heuristic automation involves combining or fusing ambiguous data about objects on a tactical display to create an assessment and prioritization of the objects in a task-relevant way.The automation is heuristic in the sense that it uses rules-of-thumb to compute the assessment. One reason for the success of the Assisted Focus concept is that the automation does not need to be perfect. Our results demonstrate that approximate assessments can produce significant operational performance gains when the automation is incorporated into an ergonomically designed display. Users can continue to make their own expert decisions while being assisted by the automatic assessments and prioritizations.
Fully 93% of expert users preferred Assisted Focus to a standard display, and response time to threats was improved by 45% for evolving threats. The Assisted Focus concept is applicable to a wide range of complex monitoring tasks such as air traffic control, missile defense, anti-submarine warfare, meteorology, oceanography, tactical situation awareness, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance.