Automated Data Collection

Human factors organizations frequently are requested to provide recommendations about design choices to a product design team. These recommendations should be based on operator performance data. However, in many cases the required information may not be present in the current literature and time and personnel resources may be limited. This paper describes how this problem has been solved by the Human Factors group in IBM at Boca Raton. We are using the IBM Personal Computer as a process controller for studies in our lab. This low cost tool facilitates the automation of studies which require the recording of data for subsequent analysis. The Personal Computer has also been used to analyze the data.