Taezoon Park's research while affiliated with Soongsil University and other places

Although humor is a well-known social lubricant defusing a complicated conflict between two parties, the efficacy of humor in human–robot interaction has barely been tested yet. This study compared the characteristics of humor performed by a robot and human to identify the possible type of jokes that a robot may play. In the experiment, a human actor performed disparaging – racist and sexist jokes, and non-disparaging (human condition and sexual) jokes, and a robot counterpart mimicked the same performance. Fifty-eight university students, 30 male and 28 female with mean age 23.10 (SD = 2.00), watched the randomly assigned jokes performed either by the robot or the human actor. The participants rated perceived humorousness, offensiveness, and willingness to share the joke with others, the perceived social presence and social attractions of the actor. The result showed that participants perceived non-disparaging jokes to be more humorous when performed by the human actor. On the other hand, the participants exhibited less disgust toward disparaging jokes when they were performed by the robot actor. This shows that humor can be used as an effective way to enrich the interaction between human and robot; but the acceptable types of humor should be carefully selected.

We aimed to examine the effects of information access cost and accountability on medical residents' information retrieval strategy and performance during prehandover preparation. Prior studies observing doctors' prehandover practices witnessed the use of memory-intensive strategies when retrieving patient information. These strategies impose potential threats to patient safety as human memory is prone to errors. Of interest in this work are the underlying determinants of information retrieval strategy and the potential impacts on medical residents' information preparation performance. A two-step research approach was adopted, consisting of semistructured interviews with 21 medical residents and a simulation-based experiment with 32 medical residents. The semistructured interviews revealed that a substantial portion of medical residents (38%) relied largely on memory for preparing handover information. The simulation-based experiment showed that higher information access cost reduced information access attempts and access duration on patient documents and harmed information preparation performance. Higher accountability led to marginally longer access to patient documents. It is important to understand the underlying determinants of medical residents' information retrieval strategy and performance during prehandover preparation. We noted the criticality of easy access to patient documents in prehandover preparation. In addition, accountability marginally influenced medical residents' information retrieval strategy. Findings from this research suggested that the cost of accessing information sources should be minimized in developing handover preparation tools. © 2015, Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.

Poor handovers contribute to medical near misses, adverse events and waste of healthcare resources. To improve handover communication, public hospitals in Singapore are among the pioneers in Asia to develop standardized handover protocols and handover training courses. This study aimed to examine junior residents' experience and perception on clinical handovers and discuss the implications on developing a standard handover protocol and handover training. Two survey studies with 47 junior residents were conducted at the

Introduction: The aim of the present study was to investigate the challenges faced by physicians during shift handovers in a university hospital that has a high handover sender/recipient ratio. Methods: A multifaceted approach was adopted, comprising recording and analysis of handover information, rating of handover quality, and shadowing of handover recipients. Data was collected at the general medical ward of a university hospital in Singapore for a period of three months. Handover information transfer (i.e. senders' and recipients' verbal communication, and recipients' handwritten notes) and handover environmental factors were analysed. The relationship between 'to-do' tasks, and information transfer, handover quality and handover duration, were examined using analysis of variance. Results: Verbal handovers for 152 patients were observed; handwritten notes on 102 (67.1%) patients and handover quality ratings for the handovers of 98 (64.5%) patients were collected. Although there was good task prioritisation (information transfer: p < 0.005, handover duration: p < 0.01), incomplete information transfer and poor implementation of nonmodifiable identifiers were observed. The high sender/recipient ratio of the hospital made face-to-face and/or bedside handover difficult to implement. Although the current handover method (i.e. use of telephone communication), allowed interactive communication, it resulted in systemic information loss due to the lack of written information. The handover environment was chaotic in the high sender/recipient ratio setting, and the physicians had no designated handover time or location. Conclusion: Handovers in high sender/recipient ratio settings are challenging. Efforts should be made to improve the handover processes in such situations, so that patient care is not compromised.

Information access cost has been reported to be one determinant of one’s information retrieval strategy. However, the “expected gain” of an information retrieval strategy has not received much attention. The present study aimed to examine the effects of confidence judgment and overconfidence bias, besides the information access cost, on the choice of information retrieval strategy and task performance. The results showed that both information access cost and confidence judgment of memory accuracy affected information access attempts, and overconfidence bias harmed information retrieval performance.

Background: Literature has identified failures in task management as direct determinants leading to accidents in the operating theatre. However, very few studies have investigated the factors underlying task management that directly influence the performance of the scrub nurses. The traditional belief that expertise is a general indicator of performance has been empirically investigated with varying results, but none has attempted to identify the task management determinants affecting performance, as influenced by the level of expertise. Objectives: (1) To examine any difference on task management behaviours between differing levels of experience during surgeries. (2) To correlate indices of task management with levels of performance evaluated by subject matter experts. Design and setting: 10 experienced and 10 novice scrub nurses were randomly selected from the Obstetrics and Gynaecology Department of a teaching hospital in Singapore. All nurses partook in a caesarean section surgery each, and their work processes were recorded via a scene camera donned by themselves. Participants: 20 scrub nurses. Methods: Two human factors experts independently mapped the task management processes onto a task management timeline, where individual tasks were coded, tallied and compared between levels of expertise. Main outcome measures: Reactive task management (task interruptions, task prioritizations), pro-active task management (anticipation, failures in anticipation), SPLINT scores (performance). Results: Novice nurses showed lower resistance to interruptions during their tasks (58% more interruptions), especially to interruptions which were not triggered by the surgeon during their surgical counts (90% more interruptions). The novice nurses also displayed poorer/less ability to anticipate the surgeons' needs, taking longer time to handover instruments (39% longer) and making more mistakes (371% more errors). Subject matter experts rated the experienced nurses significantly higher in their cognitive non-technical skills performance than the novice nurses (32% higher). Conclusions: Experienced nurses performed better than novice nurses in all aspects of task management indices and expert evaluation. This suggested better task management as effected by expertise, displaying better prioritization, planning and awareness. With these findings, it would be easy and useful to draw causal effects that can in turn guide the design of training, leading to a desirable increase in levels of efficiency and patient safety in the operating theatre.

In this paper, a new method for computing intersection between a ray and a parametric surface is proposed, which finds many applications in computer graphics, robotics and geometric modeling. The method uses the second order derivative of the surface, which can handle inherent problems that Newton–Raphson and Halley methods have such as instability caused by inappropriate initial conditions and tangential intersection. Case examples are presented to demonstrate the capability of the proposed method.

This paper examined the effect of information access cost and overconfidence bias on doctors’ information retrieval strategies and performances during pre-handover. Sixteen medical residents participated in a simulated experiment, where they studied four patient cases and later on completed recall and recognition questions. The results showed that an increase in information access cost led to less information access attempts and poorer pre-handover performance. Further, there was an interaction between information access cost and overconfidence on pre-handover performance. When information access cost was high, overconfidence contributed to poor pre-handover performance.

The dynamic nature of today's technology market requires new value-characteristic modeling methods; mainstream methods have limitations due to unrealistic assumptions, such as static customer preferences and no multicollinearity among product attributes. In particular, products with longer cycle times can suffer because the static model ignores changes in the market during the concept-to-customer lead time. This study proposes a dynamic, partial least squares path model for customer driven product design and development in order to reduce model uncertainty by formulating preference models to reflect market dynamics. The proposed dynamic model adopted partial least squares regression to handle the limited observations plagued by multicollinearity among product attributes. The main advantage of the proposed model is its ability to evaluate design alternatives during the front-end concept screening phase, using the overall product-value metric, customer-revealed value. A case study analyzing the US car market data for sedans from 1990 to 2010 showed the potential for the proposed method to be effective, with a 3.40 mean absolute percentage error. [DOI: 10.1115/1.4007448]

Different media used to present the human-robot interaction (HRI) scenarios may affect users' perception of a robot in the user studies. We investigated how different scenario media (text, video, and live interaction) might influence user evaluation of social robots based on a controlled experiment. We found that multiple aspects of user acceptance were influenced by the scenario media. Moreover, more design problems and redesign proposals were elicited when users were exposed to media with higher fidelity. The results led to useful insights into choosing scenario media in HRI evaluation.