Human reliability

Human reliability is related to the field of human factors engineering, and refers to the reliability of humans in fields such as manufacturing, transportation, the military, or medicine. Human performance can be affected by many factors such as age, circadian rhythms, state of mind, physical health, attitude, emotions, propensity for certain common mistakes, errors and cognitive biases, etc.

Human reliability is very important due to the possible adverse consequences of human errors or oversights, especially when the human is a crucial part of the large socio-technical systems as is common today. User-centered design and error-tolerant design are just two of many terms used to describe efforts to make technology better suited to operation by humans.