Handedness and Handling Safety: Exploring the Representation of Handedness in Emergency Human-Computer Interaction

Handedness, as an inherent characteristic in the human subsystem, is often overlooked or considered as having "no obvious connection" to safety. To explore the relationship between handedness and safety, this study proposed three hypotheses and conducted a series of questionnaires, experiments, and statistical analyses around them. This research system is considered a method that can accurately reflect the relationship between handedness and system safety. The results showed that left-handed testers had excellent operational and correct capture abilities in the predetermined safety scenario. Individual factors did not affect this advantage, and the advantage even expanded with the increase of individual factor scores. In addition, when considering the palm travel angle α and arm extension direction β, the characterization phenomenon of handedness showed incomplete symmetry. However, regardless of how α and β changed, the overall performance of left-handed people was still better than that of right-handed people. This further proves that left-handed operators have better accident prevention and control capabilities for accidents themselves, and this advantage makes the system closer to inherent safety. For a specific operating position (train driver), we found that left-handed drivers performed better than right-handed drivers in braking time (83.6ms ahead of braking) and emergency braking error rate (decreased by 7.7‰), indirectly verifying the unique advantage of left-handed manipulators in accident prevention or control. This study proves that handedness can become a new influencing factor of HCI safety and verifies its importance and criticality as an evaluation criterion, which establishes a bridge between handedness and safety.