CAREER: Co-Designing Hands-Free Cognitive Aids with Fast-Paced Medical Teams

Humans have limited capacity for processing information and recognizing critical events, which can lead to errors when this capacity is exceeded. In safety-critical areas such as medicine, such errors can lead to serious consequences, especially in the many cases where these errors might be preventable. A common cause of medical errors is when health workers lack situational awareness -- knowing what is going on within an environment and predicting what is likely to happen next -- and make mistakes based on this lack of awareness. This project looks to reduce these mistakes through developing novel computing and interaction techniques that support situational awareness for physically and cognitively preoccupied health workers who are part of emergency medical services (EMS) teams that provide urgent medical care in the field. The research team will work closely with EMS providers to understand their cognitive needs and develop hands-free, minimally distracting cognitive aids that support their situational awareness and decision-making in fast-paced crisis response situations. The overarching goal of this research is to determine how to support fast-response medical teams’ awareness of context-specific information and activities while accounting for their limited capacity in processing information and ability to interact with handheld computing devices while doing their job. The project is structured around three main aims. The first is to deeply understand the cognitive needs of care providers during time-critical medical events; this will be accomplished by analyzing simulation videos, eye-tracking data, and artifacts, along with observational field studies and interviews with EMS workers. The second is to design and develop hands-free cognitive aids for fast-response medical teams, through a series of participatory design workshops and usability evaluation activities grounded in socio-technical models of health information technology implementation. The third is to conduct summative assessment of a functional prototype through deploying it in training simulations, measuring task performance and patient outcomes along with effects on workers’ situational awareness and cognitive load. Together, the research will produce scientific knowledge and design implications related to situational awareness, hands-free technologies, and human computer interaction. The project will also promote interdisciplinary education and research through involving a diverse group of high school, undergraduate, and graduate students, while providing the basis for developing a rich outreach program to medical workers and health technology industry partners. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.