A paper written by researchers (Dorrit Billman, et.al.) in NASA's Human Systems Integration Division won the "Best Paper" award for the Aerospace Systems Technical Group at the 2025 Human Factors and Ergonomics Society annual meeting. The paper, titled
"Measuring Monitoring Skills Using Crew Briefing Task", sought to address the issue of inadequate monitoring, and its contribution to aviation accidents and incidents over the years. NASA researchers were able to mitigate some of these risks by identifying the skills and knowledge needed for effective anticipatory monitoring and improving the training and assessment requirements to do so.
The work was supported by the Human Contribution to Safety group within the
System-Wide Safety Project. It presented methods for online measurement of anticipatory monitoring using a briefing task that assessed the effectiveness of an on-line tutorial developing anticipatory monitoring skills. The monitoring skill takes on additional importance when projecting behavior of automated systems adds to the monitoring burden. The research provides new data types and develops practical, effective methods for improving and measuring monitoring.
