Towards Control Rooms as Human-Centered Pervasive Computing Environments

State-of-the-art control rooms are equipped with a variety of input and output devices in terms of single-user workstations, shared public screens, and multimodal alarm systems. However, operators are bound to and sitting at their respective workstations for the most part of their shifts. Therefore, cooperation efforts are hampered, and physical activity is limited for several hours. Incorporating mobile devices, wearables and sensor technologies could improve on the current mode of operation but must be considered a paradigm shift from control rooms as a collection of technically networked but stationary workstations to control rooms as pervasive computing environments being aware of people and processes. However, based on the reviewed literature, systematic approaches to this paradigm shift taking usability and user experience into account are rare. In this work, we describe a root concept for control rooms as human-centered pervasive computing environments and introduce a framework for developing a wearable assistant as one of the central and novel components. Furthermore, we describe design challenges from a socio-technical perspective based on 9 expert interviews important for further research on pervasive computing environments in safety-critical domains.