Measuring Awkwardness of Workplace Layout: Dispersion of Attentional and Psychomotor Resources within the Anesthesia Workspace

Abstract

In complex tasks such as provision of anesthesia, human operators often carry out simultaneous tasks with conflicting task demands. Workplace design can mitigate the impact of these tasks' conflict with one another, however there are few methodologies for quantifying awkward workplace layout that lead to task conflicts. The current work examines a measure of awkwardness we developed, “dispersion of attentional resources,” and further presents a graphical display to represent task conflicts within the anesthesia work domain. These measures and display methods can be generalized to other work domains to guide design.