Improving human reliability through error monitoring

The authors present an explanation of human reliability and the error monitoring concept and architecture. They present examples involving a point-of-sale error monitor and a commercial cockpit flight management system (FMS) error monitor. Despite the domains being quite different, the same error monitor design works in both. Analyses of various technological domains show that traditional approaches cannot improve the situation with respect to human reliability. System designers should use a human-centered approach which emphasizes human strengths and minimizes human weaknesses. Error monitoring is not the complete answer, but a crucial step toward a total solution