Machine intelligence presents opportunities to increase human work productivity and quality. The team will investigate effective teaming between humans and intelligent machines, similar to effective human-human teamwork, with a special focus on how human-machine teaming can be applied to medical decision making.

Awarded by NSF’s “Future of Work at the Human Technology Frontier” program, the project aims to understand  (1) whether human-machine teaming can benefit medical decision making and decision making in other related high stakes domains; (2) the guiding principles for designing effective human-machine teams; (3) barriers that currently exist for building such teams; (4) novel solutions needed to address barriers in order to develop highly performant teams; and (5) the economic and societal impacts of the proposed approach for human-machine teaming.

Medical errors often occur because healthcare providers must deal with overwhelming workloads, time pressures and constraints, and uncertainties in medical conditions. Ultimately, the research team hopes the NSF-funded project will lead to a new model of patient care in which care providers team with intelligent cognitive assistants to enhance quality of care and reduce medical errors.