Human Factors in the Digital Society

Dear Colleagues,

New Internet-based technologies have enormous potential to affect human wellbeing. This necessitates valid and consistent assessment of human factors and human performance in every area of the digital society, ranging from the everyday life of citizens to the work environment.

Different contexts are linked to similar challenges, and require similar problems to be solved: the common roots are human behaviors and new information technologies. As a result, the human-centered social-cyber-physical system has become the common reference framework in today’s society.

To attain a holistic understanding, it is important to identify challenges and opportunities related to human factors and human performance in the digital society: research in this context is still new, and significant achievements are limited.

Human factors in the digital society at large assume new perspectives, as they tend to be linked to tasks of a more cognitive rather than a physical nature. For instance, decision-making based on real time data is a new challenge for humans in various everyday scenarios. Moreover, monitoring of physical systems by the ‘Internet of Everything’ is becoming a widely adopted practice in several contexts, especially industry. Accurate modelling of cognitive tasks will enable proper investigation of the ergonomics of workplaces and of the safety and maintenance of production systems. The design of human-centered social-cyber-physical systems should also consider older individuals and people with disabilities—i.e., people less familiar with and, therefore, less inclined to adopt new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Assessing the cognitive abilities of differently aged people in the digital society requires a deep understanding of complex phenomena involving transversal competence. These are just some examples of relevant issues connected with human factors in the digital society.

The Topical Collection aims to collect recent innovative research on human factors and human performance in the digital era. Scientific contributions, ranging from basic research to applied research with pilot industrial applications and demos, are welcome. The interdisciplinary nature of this Topical Collection is consistent with contributions from different areas of competence, ranging from industrial to biomedical engineering.

Prof. Dr. Francesco Facchini
Prof. Dr. Salvatore Digiesi
Dr. Carlotta Mummolo
Collection Editors

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