An Experimental Research Facing to the Humanity Design of HUD Failure Alerts

An experimental research on display principle of Head Up display (HUD) failure alert design was conducted on the basis of aircraft failure alert relevant regulations in Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Advisory Circular (AC) 25.1322. An experimental research including HUD visual coding techniques (outline boxes, flashing with different frequencies) and binary channel alerts (visual and aural channel) was performed based on the static display interface of monochrome HUD, which was drawn by GL studio software. Subjective evaluation, signal detection assessment based on sensitivity and likelihood ratio, behavioral performance, as well as physiological measures indexed by electrocatdiogram (ECG), electrodermal Activity (EDA) data, and respiration data were recorded and analyzed for the statistical method. Results claimed that an immediate alert can be induced by the outline boxes and flashing in visual coding. As to physiological responses, flashing with low frequency had a significant lower HR than flashing with high frequency; the RRCV and SDNN (the time domain index of heart rate variability) of Group 2 (60HZ, 80DB) in Topic 2 was obviously lower than the others, which indicated a workload effect to the alerts. The alert with binary channels was evidently better than the alert with visual channel individually, and the better one was Group 2 (60HZ, 80DB) in Topic 2 in the experiment. Our study can provide a certain technical support for the design of HUD failure alert interface in ergonomics.