Human Factors - Virtual Vehicle

We have a passion to put the human at the center of innovations.

We are a group of experts to support engineering teams with critical knowledge about the human operator to create solutions with high market potential that actual users and drivers find useful and usable.

With our background in psychology, human factors, and engineering we bring together our knowledge of human perception, cognition, comfort, acceptance, trust, and behavior with scientific measurement methods to provide the knowledge about humans that engineering teams need to design and develop systems that are useable and useful for humans.

We have a passion to put the human at the center of innovations and support this through pragmatic processes that still follow scientific rigor in the areas of: Automated driving, Railroad, Smart technologies and Manufacturing

Nikolai Ebinger

HF Team Lead

Paolo Pretto

Principal Scientist – Human Perception & Interface

Manuela Prior

Scientist – Research Practice

Mateo Jukic

Human Factors Engineer – Automation & Trust

Katherine Berwind

Master thesis working student

Investigation: Human in Context

We apply state-of-the-art methods to understand the human performance and cognitive processes within their socio-cultural context and structure this knowledge for engineering.

We administer observational studies within their natural context, experimental studies in controlled environments, develop surveys, and administer interviews.

We organize market surveys and literature search to bring together the state-of-the-art in technical applications and science.

-> Find out more about our projects.

Conception: Human in Center

Within technical projects, we support requirement analyses by bringing human factors and usability considerations to the table, moderate the development of user scenarios, and perform stakeholder analyses.

We develop digital mock-ups to conceptualize user interactions for quick or detailed evaluations and iterate the designs in user studies.

We also perform task analyses to make the implicit structure of tasks explicit and help stakeholder understand the involved knowledge task execution.

Integration: Human in Model

We translate behavioral data that we collect in user studies into virtual models that allow us to integrate human constraints and capabilities in virtual tool chains that are becoming development standards for human systems integration.

For this purpose we derive the cognitive models that underlie human performance based on psychological principles and theories and make them executable within numeric simulations.

Evaluation: Human in the Loop

We measure humans interacting with technical systems in their operational environments. For this we use our instrumented driving simulators and demonstrator vehicles to collect behavioral but also psycho-physiological measurements such as eye- and gaze-tracking and galvanic skin response.

We develop and administer tailored surveys and interviews and design and execute experimental and observational studies and translate findings for practical system design decisions.

Driving instructor for automated vehicles

We focus on 4 main areas: