Human Systems Capabilites

Draper has a strong history in human systems solutions, ensuring we understand, design, and develop for our country’s most important assets – the human operators.

Our user-centered design and development methods to ensure interfaces and interactions are optimized for fielded use – providing efficient, effective tools driving mission success. Specific strengths include Human-Machine Teaming, UI/UX, Situation Awareness & Decision Support, and XR & Visual Analytics.

Draper designs and develops human-centered autonomy and adaptive systems architectures to support client missions. The key to successful implementation of such solutions includes seamless integration of these capabilities with human teammates, leveraging expertise in human-machine perceptual, computational, and physical capabilities and limitations. Draper takes a systems-level approach to optimize task sharing and team behaviors across human-machine teammates, ensuring combined capabilities across the team can meet complex task and mission goals within environmental constraints.

Draper UI/UX experts ensure that all our digital and physical solutions are human-centered, designed for simplicity, efficiency, error reduction, responsiveness, and adaptability. Where appropriate, we incorporate multimodal channels to provide the user with contextualized and easily interpreted information while filtering out noise and distractions.

Our human-focused experts, engineers, designers, and developers create first-of-a-kind solutions that provide the accuracy and reliability required when lives and mission success are at stake and quick, effective decision-making is paramount. We excel at defining complex, contextual requirements—determining what information the user needs and when under what constraints, which drives how and in what form the information should be provided. We engineer for smart data integration, robust analytics, and modularity, ensuring that our solutions deliver for the client, the mission, and the user.

Draper harnesses the power of visual analytics, information visualization, and 3D experiential design in service of our clients' mission-critical technology programs. Our technologies provide egocentric situation awareness in the moment as well as reach-back capabilities for wider mission awareness. Our XR and visualization solutions are tailored to support mission-critical training and operational goals, helping users learn rapidly and safely, perform tasks faster, and reduce errors.

Our capabilities in sensing, measuring and analyzing human performance in a variety of complex, multidomain environments provide optimization of situation awareness and cognitive load – driving understanding of human capabilities and closed-loop adaptive solutions for optimized mission outcomes. Specific strengths are in Human Signals, Human-System Modeling, Human in the Loop Simulation and Operational Impact assessment.

Draper offers expertise in measuring, monitoring, and modeling human signals—physiological and biological indicators of human states that affect behavior and performance. We design solutions leveraging multimodal signal capture, providing multiple indicators across observable behaviors and ‘unobservable’ responses via cardiovascular, musculoskeletal, and neurological signals. Such signals are analyzed via appropriate time-synched data fusion methods and used to not only assess but also predict performance outcomes to drive adaptive system design.

Building on our human-signals expertise, Draper implements artificial intelligence and machine learning to create computational team models, individual-based and personalized models, mixed initiative decision-making on human-machine teams, and social signal processing. Our position, navigation, and timing (PNT) solutions enable tracking and navigation for humans and/or autonomy—including human-machine teams and human-in-the-loop systems—inside buildings and other fixed structures, as well as spacecraft and ships where the signal must move relative to its position over time.

Simulation-based models and visualizations provide evaluative capabilities across hardware and software components, integrated systems, and systems of systems. Our visual analytics and simulation visualizations are key enabling components for Situational awareness and decision support.

The goal of developing technical solutions and/or providing training is to establish or increase knowledge and performance capabilities, with improved performance realized in an operational setting. But quantifying the impact of such solutions in operational terms is oftentimes seen as unachievable. Stakeholders are left to make acquisition decisions based on requirements met, not on how much of an impact a given solution will have on operations.