Project Details
Beyond safety and efficiency in acute care: The experience of an embodied staff-environment interaction
Applicants
Dr. Tobias Grundgeiger; Dr.-Ing. Florian Niebling
Subject Area
Image and Language Processing, Computer Graphics and Visualisation, Human Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous and Wearable Computing
Term
from 2020 to 2024
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 425868361
Safety and efficiency are important in complex, socio-technical domains containing distributed devices such as power plants or healthcare. Therefore, technical developments, evaluations, and research focused on a safe and efficient interaction with technology. Researchers implicitly or explicitly considered only classic concepts of interaction such as, for example, interaction-as-transmission (maximum throughput of information). However, our preliminary work indicated that interaction concepts, which are based on modern theories of HCI such as embodied cognition, are more suitable to explain human-technology interaction in acute care. Furthermore, classic theories neglect the experience of the user in human-technology interaction. Finally, despite constituting a ubiquitous environment (in a sense that computing is involved in many medical artifacts), the devices are not interconnected; or only for documentation purposes but not for a human-centered pervasive interaction between staff and technology.First, we aim to understand theoretically how staff considers the human-technology interaction in acute care by collecting qualitative data in the field. The data will be coded based on inductive coding categories (developed from the field data) and deductive coding categories (developed from different theoretical views on interaction). In addition, we will investigate specifically (using the qualitative data and additional survey data) the fruitfulness of three user experience concepts (instrumental, eudaimonia, and hedonic experience) and start to develop a user experience questionnaire for safety-critical domains.Second, we aim at designing and evaluating pervasive staff-environment interactions following an embodied cognition view on interaction. We will conceptualize prototypes with users, using recently suggested embodied cognition design principals, the insights from our fieldwork, and the technological possibilities. The prototypes will be realized in a physical medical simulation environment to enable the user(s) to experience the interaction with the environment for specific activities. We will iteratively develop and evaluate the pervasive interactions in relation to the technical interaction, user experience using our questionnaire, and safety. The most promising pervasive interactions will be used for a full-scale medical simulation in which we will provide a representative simulation of acute care work. In addition to the above measures, the simulation enables to measure variables that only emerge during dynamic, representative settings such as non-technical team performance, situation awareness, and clinical performance.The proposal will provide insights about the explanatory power and design power of modern theoretical concepts about interaction in safety-critical domains. The results will contribute to understanding and balancing efficiency and meaningfulness in a pervasive staff-environment interaction while maintaining safety.
DFG Programme
Priority Programmes
Co-Investigator
Dr. Oliver Happel