Tang, ZiyingMiao, Sheng2018-01-262018-01-262018-01-222017-08DSU2017Miaohttp://hdl.handle.net/11603/7720(D. Sc.) -- Towson University, 2017Today Situation Awareness (SA) has become an attractive research topic which is widely used in various and complex systems. The concept of SA is rooted in the history of military theory and has been extended to commercial domains and utilized into the human factors domain in the last few decades. My dissertation focuses on studying how SA is used in the military context and in the assistive healthcare domain. We will study how to use SA to help commanders make decisions in the battlefield and support assistive healthcare systems to help users with various disabilities. In the battlefield, S A techniques can help commanders make optimized decisions based on the intelligence from various sources. Some previous research has developed a fuzzy-based value of single piece of information determination system which delivers the most valuable information to commanders. Based on the existing system, we develop an adjustable VoI system which allows subject matter experts to tune special SA models for specific military c ontexts. Another research topic in military context is exploring the integration of complementary and contradictory information, since it is common to have multiple information describing a certain event. We also introduce the utilization of human processing for military SA based on social media data. In my dissertation, two special disability user groups are selected as targeted users, who are young adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and children with Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA). We employ SA techniques to implement assistive healthcare systems to help the targeted users to perform better daily activities, communicating with others, controlling their living environment, and even monitoring their needs and providing real-time help. The objective of this study is to improve their quality of life.Situation awareness application in military context -- Assistive healthcare system for young adults with autism spectrum disorder -- Exploring assistive healthcare system for young children with spinal muscular atrophyapplication/pdfxii, 178 pagesen-USText