Miriam Armstrong

Many Department of Defense (DoD) systems aim to increase or maintain Situational Awareness (SA) at the individual or group level. In some cases, maintenance or enhancement of SA is listed as a primary function or requirement of the system. However, during test and evaluation SA is examined inconsistently or is not measured at all. Situational Awareness Linked Indicators Adapted to Novel Tasks (SALIANT) is an empirically-based methodology meant to measure SA at the team, or group, level....

This poster provides an example of how a design thinking framework can facilitate operational test design. Design thinking is a problem-solving approach of interest to many groups including those in the test and evaluation community. Design thinking promotes the principles of human-centeredness, iteration, and diversity and it can be accomplished via a five-phased approach. Following this approach, designers create innovated product solutions by (l) conducting research to empathize with their users, (2) defining specific user problems, (3) ideating on solutions that address the defined problems, (4) prototyping the product, and (5) testing the prototype....

Situation Awareness (SA) plays a key role in decision making and human performance, higher operator SA is associated with increased operator performance and decreased operator errors. While maintaining or improving “situational awareness” is a common requirement for systems under test, there is no single standardized method or metric for quantifying SA in operational testing (OT). This leads to varied and sometimes suboptimal treatments of SA measurement across programs and test events....