| Affiliations: | |
| Project Leader: | Namgyun Kim ng1022.kim@tamu.edu Architecture |
| Faculty Mentor: | Ahn, Changbum Ryan. Ph.D. |
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Meeting Times:
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TBA |
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Team Size:
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3
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| Open Spots: | 0 |
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Special Opportunities:
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1. Participate in the NSF funded research project 2. Earning co-authorship on publications 3. Learn how to design and execute an experiment with human subject
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Team Needs:
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– Experience with VR (Unity game engine) – Knowledge in programming an interactive VR environment using C# – Ability to work independently and as part of a team and a drive to create a novel research direction |
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Description:
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Frequent or prolonged exposures to workplace hazards cause workers’ risk habituation. Habituated workers tend to underestimate risk and frequently engage in unsafe behaviors. This research aims to discover new knowledge regarding how a Virtual Reality (VR)-enabled safety-training module should be designed to effectively interrupt workers’ habituated behaviors, a difficult behavior-change problem for learning. Experiencing consequences for a behavior change is hardly implemented with fidelity, since a worker’s unsafe behaviors are rarely replicated and observed in a training setting, including in a VR environment. The research will create a system to efficiently elicit a worker’s unsafe/habituated behaviors, sense the degree of habituation using biosensors (e.g., EDA, EEG, and yet tracking sensors), and provide accident simulations with aversive feedback, thereby allowing a worker to experience the consequences of his/her habituated behaviors. Also, this research will examine the impact of intervention timing and associated aversive sensory feedback on (a) habituation to warning signals at the perceptual level and (b) habituated behavior. Ultimately, these research findings will provide a foundation for creating VR safety-training modules for stimulating a behavior change, which is still scarce in the safety science and cyberlearning literatures. |