New HMI Cluster Activities: IMPROVE and INCLUSIVE Join Forces

Seeking for new cluster activities within the community for human-machine interface (HMI), the IMPROVE consortium came across INCLUSIVE – a project that has just started last October. With all of its previous cluster projects ending in 2015, IMPROVE needed new partners focusing on HMI research and its wider application.

INCLUSIVE is a project focusing on the simplification of HMI targeting to adapt the automation system to human operator capabilities. The background: The market demand for flexible production leads to increasingly complex systems and more articulated HMI which can, in fact, exclude elderly people from their working environment. Even with their vast experience, they tend to feel uncomfortable when having to interact with a complex computerised system. Moreover, complex HMI may create a barrier to young, inexperienced or disabled people.

INCLUSIVE is therefore working on an ecosystem of technological innovations driven by human factors analysis and applied to three concrete industrial use cases. The project is based on three pillars:

  • Human capabilities measurement
  • Adaptation of interfaces to human capabilities
  • Teaching and training unskilled users

The European Commission strongly encourages project teams to set up research clusters in order to save resources, foster the exploitation of results and strengthen the market position for new developments.

The cooperation between IMPROVE and INCLUSIVE primarily aims to

  • disseminate the projects’ tangible outcomes in order to support industrial exploitation
  • determine the state of the art within their areas of research
  • foster collaboration for further research and cluster activities

Both IMPROVE and INCLUSIVE are open towards further cluster activities in the field of Factories of the Future (FoF) and HMI.