Foreword

Consequently to the increasing integration of new technologies in our everyday life, fundamental investigations should be held on problems created by Human-Machine interaction. All fields of life are concerned. Humans are confronted to machines everywhere, in work, at home, outside, spare-time... Technicians, designer and scientists are generally well prepared, thanks to their knowledge, to manage the use of machines. However, public at large are sometimes disconcerted when they have to use or to be assisted by machines. Presently, machines are often and even always used, and it seems diffcult to get rid of it. Human assistance by machines is always increasing with scientific progress. This assistance is everywhere. At home (domestic appliances...), in banking systems, during spare-time (camcorder...), in transport, healthcare (scanners...), special machines (human disability assistance). The presence of all these machines in our life must raise up thoughts on the best way to use it in order to make the best integration of the machine in the society, so that it will be accepted and use by everyone.
HuMaN07 is the first edition of an international conference dealing with human-machine interaction. This interaction is very large and can be subdivided in numerous fields. We suggested to concentrate on three application fields: healthcare, transport and human disability that seems to be particularly of interest in the human-machine interaction domain. The conference is structured in four types of presentations: Plenary sessions animated by well known scientists, oral presentation, invited thematic sessions and poster sessions. The conference duration did not permit to accept all submitted papers. Thematic matching, submission format, and obviously scientific content quality were the criteria of selection. The conference is held with three parallel sessions. For this first edition of HuMaN, about ten countries are represented by their scientist contribution which shows the interest to this theme.
The conference will be held at Timimoun, a marvellous oasis of the Algerian Sahara,
Zaki Sari
Organising Committee Chairman
Alain Pruski
Scientific Committee Chaiman

CONTACT
Laboratoire d'Automatique des Systèmes Coopératifs
Université de Metz, Ile du Saulcy, BP 80794, 57012 METZ Cedex 1
Tél: + (33) 387 315 281, Fax : + (33) 387 315 333
Design LASC