ProjectProposal-VaheOughourlian
From CS160 User Interfaces Fa06
Contents |
Problem Description
The problem at hand is the antiquated and disjoint service we see in our local hospitals, particularly in emergency situations, in regards to patient records; for example, record keeping, record recall, or alerting of appropriate departments (such as for blood tests) for services. Often only one paper record of a patient's information is created when the patient is admitted for treatment. This creates a problem for the dissemination of this information among the various departments (and various doctors and nurses) of the hospital working on a single patient. The nurse may take the record back to her station for transcription. The folder may be misplaced underneath another. The clipboard may fall to the floor and get kicked underneath a cabinet. In all these situations, a digital extra would be immediately avaialble on the computer.
Also, it may be unclear as to who ordered which treatment option when, as different doctors who may be working on the same patient may prescribe different medicines, whereas a digital representation would carry an ID and timestamp with it. If a doctor or nurse wishes to get the immediate opinion of another medical professional in another part of the building, or in another medical facility altogether, he or she must wait until the medical records can be faxed over, or must rely on the incomplete verbal relay of information over a voice link, as opposed to a digital copy of the record itself.
Target User Group
The target user group is the community of medical professionals, which includes doctors, nurses, emergency medical technicians, all of whom may have varying levels of computer expertise but are almost certainly familiar with the use of pen and paper. They should, to a novice to intermediate degree, be familiar with interaction with digital devices such as a computer, and at least be adequate in the use of a mouse and keyboard and some typical software, such as Microsoft Word. This group will require a quick, easy to use, reliable input system mimicing their most common tools for record keeping (i.e. - pen and paper with clerical input to a computer).
Problem Context
The difficulties that arise for the users of the patient record system include the limited spaces for storage of paperwork as found in many hospitals. The nurse's station is often the hub of all documents pertaining to patients, and usually are quite small since a premium is put in hospitals for patient space (rooms, beds). The doctor's don't have much room either, as their offices are often far from the patient areas and are not overly large either. The doctors and nurses often can only hold items that can easily be placed in a lab coat. Also, any of the equipment they carry must be light weight, since they are on their feet for most of their shifts, so even a small, three pound tablet PC would be an undesirable solution.
Another issue is that any solution pertaining to patient records must be available within the confines and highly unstable environs of a moving ambulance. Thus, any hard-drive-using device would be somewhat impractical as its life expectancy would be reduced in the rough-and-tumble environment in a moving vehicle.
Solution Sketch
The solution to this unification issue involves the use of the input features of the Annoto digital pen system combined with a software interface designed to unify the input from the Annoto digital pen and translate the pertinent input to be put to multiple uses. Perhaps checkboxes will be used to signal different departments automatically who may need to see the patient or run tests on patient data.
The system should also take into account the abilities of the user to adapt to the use of the Annoto pen system, and design its uses accordingly. For example, if the users of the system don't have the time to dock the pen often, we must see about some kind of bluetooth polling system, where the server software may pull the memory data from the pen wirelessly (though this might not be possible). The other concern is the use of OCR technology and it's reliability in this instance, considering reliability in regard to patient records is very important. The solution may still require the secretarial work of transcribing the input from the pen system manually.
