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By John Higgins, PEO IEW&S Public Affairs

Military technology, in any form, has at least one major requirement: it has to be useable by Soldiers.

Under Program Executive Office, Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors (PEO IEW&S), this critical need is met by a process called Human Systems Integration (HSI).

The process and purpose of HSI is to integrate human usability into system definition, design, development, and evaluation. This process makes equipment easier to operate, maintain and sustain. HSI also can increase efficiency across the board, from trying to reduce the time it takes to train to use a piece of equipment to making it easy to use that it’s available to a broader range of soldier.

To understand the importance of the interface to the Soldier, we need only look to the AR family of rifles. Over time, they have been altered and augmented to suit the Soldier’s needs. The initial design of the M16 was informed by mission needs, a lighter battle rifle with more ammunition. As the weapon and the missions requiring it evolved, it became even lighter, more comfortable and more durable.

The rifle is relatively simple however, compared to the vast array of technologies available to the modern warfighter from not only PEO IEW&S but other commands and military laboratories.

The PEO brings together soldiers and professional in the fields of design, engineering and psychology to ensure the best interface for equipment.
“You want to keep the Soldier and their needs in mind throughout the design process,” said Diane Quarles, a research psychologist with Army Research Laboratory, Human Research and Engineering Directorate, U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command (RDECOM).

“I’ve been able to apply techniques learned in training and education, such as cognitive psychology, learning and memory” said Quarles. “A good user interface starts with understanding how your users think.” Quarles worked for years in commercial development of products for consumers, working with engineers and developers on products like cell phones.

“Years ago we had problems with users not being able to successfully conference.” said Quarles, with an energy to her speech that exudes her enthusiasm for the work. “They would drop one of the users and it was a big deal to make that change, but when our developers actually sat and watched the user go through what they were doing and complaining, that fix got implemented.”

Now for Quarles, the users are soldiers and the equipment is a great deal more complex. Sharing this mission with her is Pamela Savage-Knepshield, Senior Research Psychologist under RDECOM with 29 years of experience in telecom design. Savage-Knepshield even holds a patent for a novel implementation of caller ID on Key/PBX telecommunications systems.

“One of the biggest challenges for users of military systems is the additional cognitive workload imposed by operating in a systems of systems architecture.” said Knepshield. “Very few of our systems operate in isolation, but this is how they are designed and often tested. Our systems need to incorporate a wizard-like or automated approach to troubleshooting and system configuration. Our human factors engineers (HFEs) need to be involved earlier in the acquisition process to identify user interface requirements and conduct early user needs analyses to inform design. Throughout the design process, HFEs need to be conducting usability studies to incrementally refine system design – especially for the most frequently used system functionality.”

Sgt. 1st Class David Hoisington, a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom who is the Enlisted Advisor for Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance and Senior Enlisted Advisor for Human Research and Engineering Directorate, knows how important HSI is, and has seen Knepshield’s observations firsthand.

“I think a lot of the developers that we have on contract with the Army are just realizing a need to make everything look similar. If you have one system that has five different looks and builds?” said Hoisington in a very measured way, using even tones. “You’re gonna have system failures and that’s just being realized and people are just starting to implement user interface design to make sure that all of those components to the system match each other.”

“Generally the first thing a Soldier does is try to make sure it functions, if it works they will accept it, sometimes to their own detriment.” Hoisington admitted. “I’ve seen systems with a haphazard graphic user interface (GUI) that’s hard to use, but it functions so the soldier takes it. It might take the soldier longer to accomplish a mission than it would if they had a better GUI, but at the same time the soldier says ‘I got a mission to accomplish, I’ll take what I can get to accomplish that mission.’”

Hoisington is a consummate non-commissioned officer (NCO), who sees how technology can benefit what’s most important to an NCO: Soldiers.

“I believe in big data, it gives you a lot of answers and you learn a lot from it, but being able to effectively manage that data.” Hoisington said. “If I could design the perfect system, it would take data for your day-to-day soldier, how their doing, their stress levels, things like that, it would measure that and provide that to the leaders. There are a lot of times on the battlefield you see a solider that goes from perfectly good to seeing something happen in their environment to overstressed – from green to red to black – in a matter of minutes, sometimes shorter. If you as a leader can see that, you can remove that soldier from the battlefield before they injure themselves or others.”

The stress management Hoisington alludes to is actually a key part of HSI, even at the earliest stages.

“You don’t want something that’s going to add to cognitive overload,” said Quarles “There’s a lot of things going on out there, so you just want to be able to provide user interfaces that don’t cause them to have to have think a lot. We keep saying ‘they’re complex’ systems,’ but isn’t your phone complex underneath? It can be as complex as you want underneath the hood, but whatever they see shouldn’t be.”

Hoisington agrees, saying “Talking to soldiers has been key. That’s how we find what things are working, what things aren’t. I think a lot of the developers we have in the Army are just realizing a need to make everything look similar. If you have one system that has five different looks and builds, you’re gonna have system failures.”

Cross capability isn’t going away anytime soon. To go back the M16 and M4, we need only look to the rail system, now ubiquitous on many battle rifles, to see how important it is. Different tools on the rifle make it more compatible with different missions and Soldiers and the rail system makes that happen.

In the emerging field of Electro Magnetic Spectrum Warfare, a whole new class of tools and Soldiers are being grown. PEO IEW&S’s Electronic Warfare Planning and Management Tool (EWPMT), is an “inherently collaborative” program according to Kent Gibson, Chief Engineer for Product Manager Electronic Warfare Integration. The EWPMT has to deliver data from across the electromagnetic spectrum in an understandable and clear way. To do that, it has to function less like a piece of software and more like a crew served weapon.

“You need more than just the single soldier to make all this work.” said Gibson, “It requires the network to be up and operational in order to pass messages around in order collaborate, to get reports from the different sensors. It requires our partners that are providing the hardware where virtual machines run. They have to provide some service level agreement or service back to our program. The sensors have to be compliant with a standard of marking up their reports, sending back triggers and alerts that are of importance to the spectrum managers, the electronic warfare officer and the intelligence analyst.”

Savage-Knepsheild is even blunter about functionality and the soldier. “As far as warfighters using military equipment,” she said, “I have seen them come to expect the same user experience that they have become accustomed to using apps on the web and smartphones. They are much more critical of systems that are not intuitive and that do not facilitate their ability to leverage and transfer the training that they have obtained on commercial systems to the systems they use on the battlefield.”

As the PEO IEW&S and the Army at large are learning, HSI is not an afterthought, but rather a critical functional area for the creation of military technology.

Mark Kitz, Division Chief of the Systems of Systems Engineering (SoSE) team at the PEO said, “The PEO is looking to broaden the HSI program across its portfolio and believes it is a critical part of the development phase of acquisition. We are very proud of the HSI accomplishments by the Program managers, and since HSI is now a requirement in the DoD 5000 process, so will it be a staple in our engineering policies going forward.”[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]