Keywords

1 Introduction and Background

1.1 Problem Statement

Technological advancements and innovative concepts in the world of Science Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), have led to a breakthrough and cutting-edge solution to various projects with AI, most especially the VR realm. The computational power derived from this breakthrough has created additional opportunities that support more human problem-solving opportunities and provide optimum expertise in the field of automation. Since ergonomics also deals with the efficiency of design for humans, it is necessary to show the relationship between new and innovative technologies such as virtual reality to the field of applied ergonomics.

This paper aims to show the link and connection between VR and applied ergonomics through a bibliometric and content analysis. The analysis will be done through software programs including Mendeley, MaxQDA and Harzing. The main point of the analysis will be to show the strong correlation between VR and ergonomics using keywords such as Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence, Human-Computer Interaction, and Ergonomics.

In order to motivate this systematic review of virtual reality within digital human modeling, it may be useful to consider the following. Though not initially apparent, virtual reality has traditionally been an important part of digital human modeling. And many digital human modeling studies and design initiatives have had ergonomics and human factors as a foundation. Applied ergonomics is also considered in this analysis while digital human modeling methodologies have had ergonomics-related applications across many industries in recent years.

A search of “digital human modeling” at AuthorMapper.com recognizes 1975 articles from the years 2002 to present. Based on analytics within AuthorMapper highlighted on the search page, “Virtual reality” is the next leading term among keywords after “ergonomics” and “human factors”. With “virtual reality” as a leading term ahead of “digital human modeling” within the database of related articles on “digital human modeling”, it is important to understand the emerging trends associated with virtual reality that are in this analysis and article.

2 Research Methodology

2.1 Trend Data

Fig. 1.
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Trend graph data of keywords “Artificial Intelligence (Virtual reality) and Applied Ergonomics” between the year 1992 up until 2019

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Figure 1 illustrates a trend graph data done through the report analysis on the Web of Science platform. The graph shows that the terms “Artificial Intelligence” and “Applied Ergonomics” have been cited multiple times in several articles. The term also shows a steady increase in the search of the keywords from the year 2012 up until 2018. These are the peak years that these terms became more acknowledged in the world.

2.2 Author Relationship Table

The author relationship table shown below was created through the search of Harzing. A search was done to see the authors that had more content related to Virtual Reality and Applied Ergonomics. The results from the search are laid out in the Table 1 below. Harzing also enables users to collect metadata that can be used to create an information visualization piece in the form of a linked graph.

Table 1. Author relationship table for key words “Artificial Intelligence” and “Applied Ergonomics”
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2.3 Geographic Location

The geographic location search was done using Author Mapper. The Author Mapper search for the keywords “Virtual Reality” and “Applied Ergonomics” was also done, but the terms did not yield any results. Instead a search for “Artificial Intelligence” was completed (https://www.authormapper.com/search.aspx?q=artificial+intelligence&Facet=name) (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2.
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Geographic locations for the keyword “Artificial Intelligence” generated with Author Mapper (https://www.authormapper.com/)

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3 Data Analysis and Procedures

3.1 Mendeley

Fig. 3.
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The eight articles used for this content analysis organized in the Mendeley Software. (https://www.mendeley.com/?interaction_required=true)

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Figure 3 shows the eight articles used for this content analysis organized in the Mendeley software program. These eight articles were used in the creation of this bibliometric and content analysis. Of the eight total articles, five of them used in this paper were acquired from the 4th edition of the Handbook of Human Factors and Ergonomics published by Gavriel Salvendy. The other three articles are from different sources, all listed in the references.

Harzing

Using the google scholar platform in the Harzing software program, the first search was done.

Fig. 4.
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Search is done in Harzing using the keywords “Virtual Reality” and “Applied Ergonomics” (https://harzing.com/resources/publish-or-perish)

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The keywords used were “Virtual Reality” and “Applied Ergonomics”. Figure 4 above shows a visual representation of the platform. From the results, there was a total of 980 papers. The search was done for the years 1992–2020. The results yielded a total citation of 72,687 with 74,17 citations per paper.

3.2 VOS Viewer

Another search was done using the set of keywords, “Artificial Intelligence” and “Applied Ergonomics”. More details are provided in the results section.

Metadata from the Harzing Software was used to create an information visualization piece in the form of a graph for the keywords “Virtual Reality” and “Applied Ergonomics”.

Fig. 5.
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VOSviewer visualization piece created with metadata from the Harzing search above. (https://www.vosviewer.com/)

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Fig. 6.
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Minimum occurrence and threshold on VOSviewer. (https://www.vosviewer.com/)

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As indicated in Fig. 6 below, a minimum occurrence of 10 was used for this search, to obtain efficient results. A threshold of 26 was also used. The values used for the occurrence and threshold along with the metadata derived from the search on the Harzing software can be used to replicate the VOSviewer visualization pieces.

Fig. 7.
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VOS Viewer visualization piece with additional features selected (https://www.vosviewer.com/)

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3.3 MaxQDA

Content Analysis was also completed with the MaxQDA version 2020. The eight documents were used to carry out that content analysis. A word cloud image (Fig. 8) was produced.

Fig. 8.
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MaxQDA 2020 Content Analysis Software (https://www.maxqda.com/qualitative-analysissoftware)

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The word cloud image contains the common terms that can be found in the eight documents and it also shows how the terms are all connected to Applied Ergonomics (Fig. 9).

Fig. 9.
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Bibliometric Analysis with MaxQDA (https://www.maxqda.com/qualitative-analysissoftware)

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4 Co-citation and Further Analysis

A co-citation analysis was carried out on VOS Viewer to show a connection between lead papers and authors in the world of “Virtual Reality” and “Human-Computer Interaction.” The results yielded in the analysis are shown in Fig. 10 below.

Fig. 10.
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Co-citation analysis of the terms “Virtual Reality” AND “Human Computer Interaction.” (https://www.vosviewer.com/)

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In results, the different colors represent the clusters. The search for the terms “Virtual Reality” AND “Human-Computer Interaction” produced a total of eight different clusters. Each cluster contains three-seven nodes that are connected.

Fig. 11.
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Co-citation analysis of the terms “Artificial Intelligence” AND Human Computer Interaction. (https://www.vosviewer.com/)

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The nodes in each cluster represent a publication. A link between two nodes indicates the publications have been cited together. Another co-citation analysis was also conducted for lead publications in the field of “Artificial Intelligence” and “Human-Computer Interaction”. The results of this analysis are shown in Fig. 11 above.

The results from Fig. 11 are not much different from the VOS viewer bibliometric results are shown in Fig. 10. Some popular authors are Guo J., Weng D., Zhang Z., Jiang H., Liu Y., Wang Y, Tarng S., Wang D., Hu Y. with publications such as “Mixed Reality Office System Based on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: Towards the long-term immersion in virtual environments” and “Estimating Cognitive Processes Related to Haptic Interaction within Virtual Environments”. These are a few publications that have a strong relationship between various facets of Artificial Intelligence, and they show a connection to the term Human-Computer Interaction.

Figure 12 above shows some further analysis that was completed for the terms “Artificial Intelligence” AND “Virtual Reality” AND “Human-Computer Interaction”. The results also show a clear connection between authors and their lead publications in their various fields. This result depicts the authors whose publications are strongly entwined with the world of Human-Computer Interaction.

Fig. 12.
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VOS viewer Co-citation analysis of the terms “Virtual Reality”, “Artificial Intelligence” and “Human Computer Interaction. (https://www.vosviewer.com/)

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5 Results

While doing searches, the keywords “Cognitive Ergonomics”, “Engineering Psychology”, “Automation”, “Human-Computer Interaction”, “Safety Ergonomics”, “Contemporary Ergonomic”, “Work design” and “Accident Performance” were quite redundant. The regular occurrence of these keywords depicts the fact that there is a correlation between applied ergonomics and AI, especially because VR is a subfield of AI. Therefore, it is safe to say that this was a successful bibliometric and content analysis.

6 Discussion

Terms like “Cognitive Ergonomics” came up on multiple occasions of searches with the keywords “Artificial Intelligence and “Applied Ergonomics”. Therefore, there was more emphasis to focus on this keyword. This is unsurprising considering that Cognitive Ergonomics is a field that deals with design systems and the environment, in conjunction with how humans interact with the design system and their cognitive abilities. It can be concluded that the two fields of AI and Applied Ergonomics overlap to birth the world of Cognitive Ergonomics.

According to Fahimnia et al bibliometric review analysis on green supply and chain management, citation analysis is used to examine the degree of connectivity between pairs of nodes/papers a created network (Fahimnia et al. 2015). The analysis results in Figs. 10, 11 and 12 were all connected to Human-Computer Interaction and Ergonomics. Authors like Guo J., Weng D., Zhang Z., Jiang H., Liu Y., Wang Y, Tarng S., Wang D., Hu Y., Jyoti V., Lahiri U are shown to appear in different nodes for the various analysis, their work shows the connectivity to Human-Computer Interaction and this can be seen through the connection of clusters and nodes. These authors have published papers with titles like “Human-Computer Interaction based Joint Attention cues: Implications on functional and physiological measures for children with autism spectrum disorder”, “How we trust, perceive, and learn from virtual humans: The influence of voice quality”, “Virtual and augmented reality for positive social impact” and “Enacting Virtual Reality:

The Philosophy and Cognitive Science of Optimal Virtual Experience”. The papers listed here are just a few of the many papers that have shown a significant connection to the field of Human-Computer Interaction. As also seen in the VOSviewer visualization piece of the metadata analysis in Figs. 5 and 7, “Human-Computer Interaction” happens to be a redundant term that appears in the visualization pieces. Terms like “ergonomics” and “virtual environments” also appear repeatedly. The same redundancy of these terms is reflected in the word cloud derived from MAXQDA. Terms like “human-automation”, “human-interaction”, “visualization”, “design” and “systems” are present in the word cloud. These terms have a relationship to Human-Commuter Interaction and Ergonomics.

7 Future Work

As the world keeps expanding so does the innovative technological advancement. Advanced technological innovation in AI and VR have led to groundbreaking solutions and troubleshooting of various problems in different facets of human life. For example, in the medical field, VR has played a huge role in physical therapy for individuals with impaired limbs. AI has also come in very handy in the autonomous driving communities. AI has also been proven to make accurate predictions that provide solutions to propel business organizations forward.

There is also no gainsaying that the application of ergonomics has been effective in ensuring that the design of these advanced technologies is well suited for different objectives in the day-to-day life of a human. However, more research needs to be done in the realm of other areas of ergonomics. For example, Cognitive Ergonomics, which is a subfield of ergonomics whereby human thought processes are replicated to an automated system. Researchers and engineers need to collaborate in the future to create more advanced systems that can replicate the human mind, thoughts, and ideologies.