“Once you’re in the denial business, it’s hard to know when to stop. Captains routinely overload their boats, ignore storm warnings, stow their life rafts in the wheelhouse, and disarm their emergency radio beacons. Coast Guard inspectors say that going down at sea is so unthinkable to many owner captains that they don’t even take basic precautions.”
Getting stuck in denial, whether through cognitive load, the inability to switch through multiple data streams, or because of irrelevant or obscured data can be mitigated with awareness. The ability to maintain the big picture is known as Situation Awareness. It is not an inherent ability; it is an acquired domain expertise supported by perception, comprehension and projection.
Situation Awareness has been studied in the military, aviation, security and other domains, and is defined by Mica Endsley, the first female Chief Scientist of the U.S. Air Force and author of over 200 scientific articles and reports on Situation Awareness, as is “the perception of environmental elements and events with respect to time or space, the comprehension of their meaning, and the projection of their future status”. None of the three levels of situation awareness involves decision-making, however attaining and assessing each level, enables the warning decision.
As an exercise, let’s take a look at how Situation Awareness impacts an airfield environment. In this example, we’ll use video we’ve taken of an airfield obscured by clouds. The first level of situation awareness is the perception of environmental elements with respect to time and space. At this time, we will focus on the video on the left.
As the video begins, we’re aware of a mountain landscape view, a possible air traffic tower, and clouds. At 10 seconds into the video, we see a light plane land and understand there to be a landing strip. As we gaze across the landscape, we see obscured mountains, a large landscape view, and more dense clouds. We have moved our awareness through the three levels of situation awareness. However, the level one data that is being masked, that can eventually lead to a security and safety failure, is that the most relevant data is not available and it is being obscured.
In this example video, the scene is viewed with two different settings. One is traditional video, while the other on the left, is video enhanced with ProHawk SDK software. The ProHawk SDK reveals more significant features that were not available or obscured in the traditional video format. Observation of the traditional video stream is inconclusive for additional air traffic, while the other video clearly shows a second plane emerging from the clouds moments before it’s detectable on the un-enhanced video. Because of the lack of perception of the environmental elements and events in the original video, the airfield environment would not have been able to see the big picture and accurately project the consequences of that meaning.
Through technology like ProHawk SDK, combined with processes used to achieve that state, we have the ability to provide a better level of what we call, “situational awareness”, and thus optimum decision making to those who serve us in so many different ways.
For fire fighters peering into smoke and needing to respond quickly to events that are happening. For law enforcement who are responding in darkness, or peering into fog, or driving through smoke or intense rain and need to react quicker to things they might be confronted with. For security personnel who are monitoring events and looking for anomalies, and then need to make decisions based on what they see, there’s a lot riding on the data and processes necessary to make real-time decision making possible.
At Pieris Consulting, we can help integrate and implement field operations improvements with technology such as ProHawk visual clarity SDK to deliver three critical outcomes:
1. More complete, consistent and accurate data from the field
2. Faster time to completion and comprehension
3. Timely and informed business decisions.
Pieris provides expertise in strategy and ‘big data consulting and technology implementation services by orchestrating disparate systems, components and our expansive network to enable rapid deployment, configuration, data ingest and visualization. Our strategic relationships with vendors such as’ ProHawk, allows us to provide customer with technologies that can be optimized to their environment and business needs.
About Pieris Consulting
Pieris Consulting is a global services and solutions firm in the US and Australia, with specialization in situational awareness. Pieris Consulting helps you gather the right data, implement the right supporting process, and integrate the tools you need to improve performance, quality and compliance all while reducing costs. We provide expertise in strategy, data, analytics and situational awareness; solutions development & integration; and marketing and product management.