Informing the design of situated glyphs for a care facility

Abstract

Abstract-Informing caregivers by providing them with contextual medical information can significantly improve the quality of patient care activities. However, information flow in hospitals is still tied to traditional manual or digitised lengthy patient record files that are often not accessible while caregivers are attending to patients. Leveraging the proliferation of pervasive awareness technologies (sensors, actuators and mobile displays), recent studies have explored this information presentation aspect borrowing theories from context-aware computing, i.e., presenting subtle information contextually to support the activity at hand. However, the understanding of the information space (i.e., what information should be presented) is still fairly abstruse, which inhibits the deployment of such real-time activity support systems. To this end, this paper first presents situated glyphs, a graphical entity to encode situation specific information, and then presents our findings from an in-situ qualitative study addressing the information space tailored to such glyphs. Applying technology probes using situated glyphs and different glyph display form factors, the study aimed at uncovering the information space pertained to both primary and secondary medical care. Our analysis has resulted in a large set of information types as well as given us deeper insight on the principles for designing future situated glyphs. We report our findings in this paper that we expect would provide a solid foundation for designing future assistive systems to support patient care activities.

What's the Situation with Situated Visualization? A Survey and Perspectives on Situatedness

“…C2 Situated Glyphs are small context-aware displays that show activity-specific information [51,95] to support work activities of healthcare professionals. The project explored the use of small wearable, mobile, or fixed displays that show relevant information to support interleaved activities involving multiple individuals and different types of equipment in the context of healthcare work.…”

“…Similarly, Situated Glyphs (C2) [51,95] are visualizations that are designed for a work context, in this case to assist nurses in a hospital setting. While the entity-centric, activity-centric and space-centric placements were informed by initial fieldwork in the ward, when conducting studies in the hospital with nurses and the prototypes, a number of additional issues emerged.…”

“…Beyond evaluating a visualization design, many design constraints will also only become apparent by taking into account the environment in which the visualization will be deployed. This requires the use of and further research into developing in-situ (and participatory) design tools and methods, which some researchers have started exploring [8,14,24,44,95]. For example, Bressa et al [8] explored the use of several situated design and visualization sketching exercises, including the use of magnetic whiteboard sheets and tiles mimicking the form factor of small displays.…”

Data Every Day: Designing and Living with Personal Situated Visualizations

“…Research on situated visualization includes several application areas such as public and urban visualization [17,18,56,87], tools for urban planners [92], wearable visualization [64], and supporting reflection in domestic settings [85]. Researchers have also explored different ideation, sketching and prototyping approaches for designing situated visualizations [9,19,29,90].…”

Corsican Twin

“…According to Oulasvirta et al, actually being in the place encourages designers to consider contextual elements, is more inspiring and makes ideas more memorable [30]. Prototyping visualisations in context has been applied to street infographics [9,10] and hospitals [35].…”