Measuring trust in inspection systems: A multivariate approach

Inspection plays a very important role to ensure the product reliability demanded by modern consumers. Traditionally, objective performance measures such as speed and accuracy are often used in an inspection system. However, with more and more inspection process being automated, human inspector's role becomes more like a supervisor. Studies of supervisory control have confirmed that trust in automation, a subjective measure, has great impact on system performance. Therefore, measuring trust in an inspection system has the potential to help design the inspection system. Some efforts have been made to define the abstract concept of trust, both in social science and engineering areas. In particular, as a first step, an earlier study surveyed people familiar with the inspection system and developed a questionnaire to measure trust in inspection systems. Considering the multi-dimensional nature of the concept, this study adopted multivariate statistical approaches to attempt to define trust in the context of inspection systems. Results from this study have the potential to help understand the interactions between humans and computers in during the inspection process and design a better inspection system.