Selection of Control Panel Design Using Cognitive Load Parameters Based on Physiological Data: An Experimental Study

Human–Computer Interaction-based (HCI) control panels are small, handheld, touch-based systems which present multiple sensors data of the digital shop floor. The complexity of HCI-based control panel design would increase in digital shop floors due to use of multiple modalities of interaction, task complexities and type of information presented through HCI systems. Previous literature on control panel design has suggested analogue, digital and graphical display methods to present sensor data, however, these display methods have not been evaluated through cognitive load (CL). Also, there is dearth of literature on comparison of CL caused by different display designs using physiological data. This paper reports use of physiological data, task performance data and subjective data to measure CLs caused by different display designs. Results were congruent across these data. Findings of this paper suggested that ‘digital display’ caused high CL compared to analogue and hybrid display for ‘monitoring and controlling tasks’.