Creating Effective Automation to Maintain Explicit User Engagement

Loss of user engagement with automation in increasingly complex environments, such as driving a car, can have increasingly unexpected and consequential impacts. This paper presents a three-step process for designing cooperative automation into existing systems to maximize system performance with the constraint of maintaining user engagement. The first step identifies beneficial areas for automation through user testing, focusing on areas where human capabilities constrain performance. Next, an automation is created to perform a portion of the task leading to the constraint. User tests at this point compare different automation types to choose an automation that improves on human-only performance. Lastly, the automation trigger is adjusted to allow the human to maintain engagement with the system at a level desired to avoid the risks associated with loss of user engagement. This process is demonstrated through three human-in-the-loop experiments which illustrate the trade-space between maintaining human engagement and improving system performance.