An ergonomic driver workspace and interface design is essential to ensure a healthier and comfortable driving experience in terms of driver perceptions, postures, and interface pressures. Developing more effective methods for driver-side interior design and evaluation, hence, requires thorough investigation of: 1) which perceptual responses are more relevant to ensuring ergonomic quality of a design, 2) the interrelationships among perceptual responses and objective measures, and 3) whether current assumptions regarding driver behaviors, and tools for specifying these behaviors, are valid for the design and evaluation. Existing studies, however, have rarely addressed these topics comprehensively, and often have been conducted with unsubstantiated assumptions. In contrast, this work sought to address these topics in a way that jointly considers characteristics of driver perceptions, behaviors, and objective measures to develop an improved design and evaluation methodology for driver workspace and interface, and that can also investigate the validity of implicit assumptions regarding perceptual relevance and drivers' behaviors. The first part of this work investigated drivers' perceptions in relation to driver workspace design and evaluation. Specifically, it examined the efficacy of several perceptual ratings, when used for evaluating automobile interface design. Results showed that comfort ratings were more effective at distinguishing among interface designs, in contrast to the current common practice of using discomfort ratings for designing and evaluating interface designs. Two distinct decision processes to relate local to global perceptions were also identified (i.e., global comfort as an average of local comforts, and global discomfort predominantly influenced by maximal local discomforts). These findings were observed consistently across age and cultural groups. In addition, this work provided empirical support for an earlier hypothetical comfort/discomfort model, which posited comfort and discomfort are complementary, yet independent entities. In order to facilitate the integration of driver perceptions and dynamic behaviors into driver workspace design and evaluation, the second part of this work clarified the relationships between perceptual ratings and various types of driver-seat interface pressure. Interface pressure was found to be more strongly related to overall and comfort ratings than to discomfort ratings, which is also in marked contrast with existing work that has focused on identifying association between discomfort and interface pressure. Specific pressure interface requirements for comfortable driver workspace design and evaluation were also provided. Lastly, this work specified more rigorous driving postures for digital human models (DHMs), based on actual drivers' perceptions, postural sensitivity, and static behavioral characteristics, to facilitate proactive design and evaluation that enables cost/time efficient vehicle development. Drivers' behavioral characteristics observed in this work were applied to the driver workspace design. First, postural sensitivity obtained by using a psychophysics concept has been applied to determination of core seat track ranges. Second, postural data have been used: 1) to review relevant industry standards on driver accommodation, 2) to investigate whether driving postures are bilaterally asymmetric, 3) to provide comfortable joint ranges, and lastly 4) to identify drivers' postural strategies for interacting with a vehicle. Overall, this work identified three important behavioral characteristics, specifically a bilateral imbalance in terms of interface pressure, bilaterally asymmetric joint posture, and postural strategies identified by cluster analysis. Such characteristics can be embedded in DHMs to describe more accurately actual driver behaviors inside a driver workspace, which is deemed to be a fundamental step to improved virtual ergonomic vehicle design and evaluation. In addition, the strategy-based classification method used in this work can be extended to simulate and predict more complex human motions. Practical and fundamental findings of this work will facilitate efficient and proactive design and evaluation of driver workspace and interface, and will help provide a healthier driving experience for a broader range of individuals. / Ph. D.

The Lower Atmosphere/Ionosphere Coupling Experiment (LAICE) CubeSat mission includes the payload instruments that generate scientific data by interacting with the flight computer. The LAICE Instrument Interface Board (LIIB) is designed to interface with the payload instruments and the flight computer for efficient operation of the LAICE. The uplink command packet contains commands for regulating power supply to the payload instruments and for interfacing the peripheral, called the thermal knife, with the science instruments. The LIIB is responsible for interpreting these commands in order to execute the associated functions. The architecture of the LIIB is designed such that it not only takes into account all the requirements of the systems and instruments on the LAICE, but also ensures smooth flight data analysis at the ground station end. The approach taken to build the design makes the entire process intuitive and easier to debug. This thesis describes the design and development of the LIIB firmware, to ensure proper functioning of the LAICE. The firmware design is presented first, by initially defining the architecture based on the system requirements and progressing eventually to its development at the system level. End-to-end testing with the payload instruments and thermal knife setup verifies the operation of the LAICE LIIB firmware and electronics, thus qualifying the instrument for deployment within the LAICE. / Master of Science / The Lower Atmosphere/Ionosphere Coupling Experiment (LAICE) is a satellite that computes and exchanges science data between the flight computer and the three payload instruments. The LAICE Instrument Interface Board (LIIB) is designed to interface the flight computer and the payload instruments, and regulate the communication between them. Additionally, the LIIB is responsible for controlling the external hardware that interacts with the payload instruments. The thesis includes the design and development of the LIIB firmware in order to perform diverse functions such as controlling the instrument communication with the flight computer, regulating the power supply to the instrument boards, interfacing with the external hardware, referred to as the thermal knife, and integrating the various modules that perform these functions in order to meet the system requirements of the LAICE.

yes / Interface definition is an essential and integral part of systems engineering. In current practice, interface requirements or control documents are generally used to define systems or subsystems interfaces. One of the challenges with the use of such documents in product development process is the diversity in their types, methodology, contents coverage, and structure across various design levels and across multidisciplinary teams, which often impedes the design process. It is important that interface information is described with appropriate detail and minimal or no ambiguity at each design level. The purpose of this paper is to present an interface analysis template (IAT) as a structured tool and coherent methodology, built upon a critical review of existing literature concepts, with the aim of using and implementing the same template for capturing interface requirements at various levels of design starting from stakeholders' level down to component level analysis. The proposed IAT is illustrated through a desktop case study of an electric pencil sharpener, and two examples of application to automotive systems.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 30-November 02, 1995 / Riviera Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada / The demand for additional computing power and more sophisticated graphics displays to strengthen real-time flight testing prompted the Real-time Systems Team to turn to graphics workstations. In order to drive graphics displays with real-time data, the questions became, "What interface to use?" and "How to integrate workstations into our existing telemetry processing system?". This paper discusses the interface and integration of graphics workstations to the Real-time Telemetry Processing System III (RTPS III).

In this thesis, we focus on the structural identification of the interface using surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) and inelastic electron tunnelling scattering (IETS). Two different molecular junctions, namely gold/ trans-1,2-bis (4-pyridyl) ethylene/gold junction and gold/4,4'-bipyridine/gold junctions in various conditions were studied and the corresponding configurations were determined. The enhancement in SERS was also studied by employing the time-dependent density functional theory. Furthermore, we studied some properties of the interface, such as the stability of the adsorbates and charge transfer properties of molecular junctions. The decrease in the stability of molecules was found when adsorbed on metallic surface and trapped in metallic junctions. Our studies explained several puzzles and by rational design, more stable molecular devices were obtained.

This thesis presents two interface circuits for impedimetric chemical sensors: one for passive chemical sensors and the other for ChemFETs. Both interfaces were fabricated in 0.35μm BiCMOS technology and provide the same output data rate of 1Hz. The interface for passive impedimetric sensors is reconfigurable for performing either resistance or capacitance measurements and provides a fully digital output with less than 81.8μW power consumption at VDD = 2.5V. The interface features a 176dB resistance dynamic range (31.6Ω-200MΩ, <±0.8% nonlinearity, and >40dB SNR) realized with only two sub-ranges to minimize calibration efforts and a 102dB capacitance dynamic range (0.8-1000pF, <±0.2% nonlinearity, and >40dB SNR). The ChemFET interface is a highly versatile system that can generate a wide range of bias voltages (VG up to 9.74V and VD up to 16.3V depending on the measurement modes) and perform either constant voltage or constant current mode measurement. At maximum rated output (VG = 9.74V, VD = 16.3V, and IDS = 15μA), the interface consumes only 2.02μW at VDD = 3.3V and provides analog readout noise levels of 0.0476μARMS at 10μA and 0.503mVRMS for IDS and VT, respectively. Besides attempting versatile system architectures, detailed noise and efficiency analysis were performed for the passive sensor interface and the ChemFET interface, respectively. The noise analysis suggests that different types of noise (correlated or uncorrelated) dominate the noise performance in different measurement ranges and, thus, noise suppression techniques, such as chopper stabilization, correlated double sampling (CDS), and oversampling/averaging, are applied to adequate parts of the interface system. The efficiency analysis of the boost capacitor charger in the ChemFET interface concludes that applying a moderate pulsewidth (200-300ns) to drive the boost converter yields the best efficiencies for charging a capacitor. Compared to interfaces described in the literature, the proposed interface for passive sensors achieves better versatility and wide dynamic range with less number of sub-ranges and power consumption. The proposed interface for ChemFETs achieves wider voltage supply range at very low power level. In-house fabricated chemical sensors, including passive chemical sensors and ChemFETs, were interfaced with the developed circuits and gas-phase chemical measurements with the systems were demonstrated. The novel passive chemical sensor tested in this thesis employs a multi-functional design, which can be configured into either a chemoresistor or a chemocapacitor; the tested ChemFET employs a bottom-gate TFT structure to allow the semiconducting film to interact with the analytes.

<p>Interaction design is about designing interactive things so that they become usable. An interaction designer’s goal is therefore to design things not only right but also to design the right things, this is called usability. In this thesis the aim is to examine how to best evaluate a user interface that is in the final design phase and that has not involved the end user in its development at all up to this stage. This thesis examined the graphical user interface of GACship III, a system used to accurately record, approve and request payment for all services/charges incurred during port/off-port calls. Three inspection methods and three test methods were investigated. This was done to determine which ones that is appropriate to use during an evaluation with little or no access to end users since this is one of the problem that GAC is facing and since this study only had access to two end users. The system, GACship III, is in the final development phase and so far the development has been made without involving the end users. A checklist for usability evaluations was developed through studying four renowned design principles in the form of Maeda’s, Raskin’s, Nielsen’s and Norman’s view of usability. The results showed that a heuristic evaluation identifies more usability problems than a digital questionnaire. Probably because the heuristic evaluation gave room for more reflections and comments and therefore turned out to be a more in depth evaluation technique. The digital questionnaire proved to be a weaker method under these conditions, but all in all, the two methods complemented each other. The results also indicated a number of usability problems in GACship III, which implied that the system is not fully efficient. The graphical user interface contained for example a severe mode error together with an unreliable drop down menu. The system consisted of parts where the usability was considered satisfactory. However, those findings will not be discussed in this thesis. In order to improve the systems usability GAC is encouraged to rectify the discrepancies. The result of the study is in addition a usability checklist that can be used during further and future graphical user interface development at GAC.</p><p><strong>Keywords: </strong>Usability, evaluation, interface, checklist, shipping. </p>

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