Making the invisible visible: New perspectives on the intersection of human-environment interactions of clinical teams in intensive care

Abstract

AbstractUnderstanding human behaviour is essential to the adoption practices for new technologies that promote safer care. This requires capturing the detail of clinical workflows to inform the design of new interactions including those with touchless technologies that decipher human-speech, gesture and motion and allow for interactions that are free of contact. Many environments in hospitals are sub-optimally designed, with a poor layout of work surfaces, cumber-some equipment that requires space and effort to manoeuvre, designs that require healthcare staff to reach awkwardly and medical devices that require extensive touch. This suggests there is a need to better understand how they can be designed. Here, we employ a new approach by installing a single 360° camera into a clinical environment to analyse touch patterns and human-environment interactions across a clinical team to recommend design considerations for new technologies with potential to reduce avoidable touch.