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Ganesh D. Bhutkar |
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Project
Title: Enhancing the Selected Usability Evaluation Methods for On-Screen User Interfaces of Medical Devices in Intensive Care Unit Supervisor: Gaur G. G. Ray Co-Supervisor: Dinesh Katre There are a variety of medical devices such as ventilator system, electrocardiogram (ECG) machine, infusion pump, patient monitoring system or ultrasound machine, which are used for patient care in Intensive Care Unit (ICU). Many of these medical devices have on-screen User Interfaces (UI) for communication with medical users namely ICU physicians, resident doctors, specialists, nursing staff - brothers / sisters or even patients. The user interfaces of medical devices display vital information related with critically-ill patients. A miscommunication during such interaction can generate medical errors which may lead to injuring or killing patients and usability of medical devices is most crucial to ensure safety and to enable physicians to focus on their patients rather than technology. The Regularity body like Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and medical standards such as ANSI/AAMI HE74:2001 and IEC 60601-1-6 have promoted usability practices to ensure that medical devices address vital user needs and avoid dangerous user errors. There are various critical factors observed with medical devices in ICU such as response time, precision, comprehension, patient safety, caregivers’ safety, fatal consequences, mental stress and Medico-Legal Cases (MLC). The expert-based Usability Evaluation Methods (UEMs) namely cognitive walkthrough, heuristic evaluation and GOMS analysis are widely used in medical field. It is observed that the medical standards and guidance documents do not provide any guidelines for applying UEMs in medical context. Medical error/criticality models and frameworks are also not mapped on UEMs. UEMs for evaluation of user interfaces miss out criticality factors affecting the reliability of UEMs. These observations lead to a research questions: What are major critical factors observed while interacting with medical user interfaces in ICU? What are the adaptations and enhancements needed in selected UEMs to make them suitable for evaluation of medical user interfaces with due consideration of related models, frameworks and criticality factors? Therefore, the major objectives of current research are to establish the critical factors and to enhance selected UEMs for medical user interfaces in ICU based on critical factors and error models /frameworks. |
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