José A. Borges

PDA vs. laptop: a comparison of two versions of a nursing documentation application

A great deal of nursing documentation involves data collection at the point of care. In most inpatient settings this activity is carried out by nurses using paper forms or simply by memorizing the information and documenting it later on the patients record. These methods for collecting data at point of care delay the update of the patient record and may result in loss of information. PDA (personal digital assistant) technology can help overcome these problems. Their small size and their wireless connection capability make them a viable alternative for collecting and entering patients data at the point of care. In this paper we describe a usability study in which we compared two versions (PDA and laptop) of a nursing documentation application in terms of the efficiency and satisfaction achieved by nurses while conducting typical tasks. The results of the study indicate that it take nurses significantly less time to look for vital signs measurements, acknowledge a pending medication order, enter I/O measurements and enter a daily assessment on a PDA than on a Laptop. However, it takes them significantly less time to read a paragraph, enter a set of vital sign measurements and write a note on a laptop than on a PDA. The results also indicate that with the exception of writing notes, the overall user satisfaction is very similar for the both systems.

A usability study of physicians' interaction with PDA and laptop applications to access an electronic patient record system

PDA (personal digital assistant) technology is beginning to emerge as a viable technology for accessing and updating patient records. A handful of studies can be found in the literature on the use of PDAs for accessing patients records. However, none have actually presented a formal usability study of user interaction with these systems. In this paper we describe a usability study in which we compared two versions (PDA and laptop) of an application to access an electronic patient record system in terms of the efficiency and satisfaction achieved by physicians while conducting typical tasks. The results of the study revealed that physicians are significantly faster on a laptop than on a PDA reading and performing tasks that require text entry. However, they are significantly faster on a PDA than on a laptop performing tasks that only require pointing and clicking. In general they are significantly more satisfied with the actions performed to complete typical tasks on the laptop than on the PDA.

An automatic resource scheduling system (ARSS)

The Automatic Resource and Scheduling System (ARSS) is a computer based tool to keep, benchmark, and use customers and resources information to improve the quality of services while improving the productivity of the resources used in a service granting organization. ARSS was originally conceived and is being developed for the Emergency Room of a local hospital. However, its principles can be extended and applied to other types of service granting organizations. The system will have a real time picture of the production system load, condition, and behavior. It will collect the data, calculate statistics, and maintain information about service goals, patients, resources and processes. ARSS can eventually become an expert system to aid health care professionals, and administrators. The results and data analyzed can help in decisions concerning patient care and resource management.

A study of physicians' interaction with text-based and graphical-based electronic patient record systems

The interaction style used in electronic patient record (EPR) systems and its usability can have a significant impact on the acceptance, efficiency and satisfaction of its users. In this paper, we describe a study of physician interaction with a text-based EPR system and a graphical-based EPR system. The usability attributes of learnability, efficiency and satisfaction are evaluated on typical tasks, such as viewing a patients record, documenting and ordering. The results of the study revealed that a graphical-based interface can significantly reduce the time it takes physicians to complete typical tasks in comparison with a text-based interface. The results of the study also revealed that physicians can get more satisfaction from interacting with a graphical-based EPR system than with a text-based system.

SAAS: automatic system for auto-supervision in an emergency room

The development of powerful and affordable information technologies has increased the interest for clinical computing systems in many hospitals. The latest trend in clinical computing are the Computer-Based Patient Record (CPR) systems. These systems help to improve the quality of health care and at the same time reduce administrative costs. We believe that there are many possibilities to improve these systems. In this paper we present the ongoing work on the development of an automatic system for auto-supervision known as SAAS (Sistema Automatico de Auto Supervision), that introduces improvements to current CPR systems. The approach used in SAAS is based on patient flow and load behavior, and on information about resources capacity and availability. It strives to improve the flow of patients moving through the system and the assignment of resources to serve them. SAAS will be able to provide status on each and all patients as well as the load condition of each resource used in the system. As the SAAS system gains experience it will be able to automatically schedule patients and resources and send warning messages to specific administrative resources. SAAS was originally conceived and is being developed for the Emergency Room (ER) of local hospitals.

An event/rule framework for specifying the behavior of distributed systems

Although a number of standards for developing distributed systems (DS) already exist (e.g., RPC, CORBA, DCE, DCOM, Java RMI, Jini), they still lack of abstractions, services and tools for specifying the behavior of a DS. The specification in these environments is limited to the interface, i.e., which are the attributes and methods of distributed objects. We believe that behavioral ions should be part of the specification of a DS. This paper presents ERF, an Event/Rule Framework that provides a set of ions for specifying the behavior of DS in terms of events and rules. Rules in ERF are used to specify how distributed objects react to event occurrences. ERF has an open architecture which can be integrated to support different environments like CORBA, RMI and Jini.

HCI education & research at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez

HCI at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) of the University of Puerto Rico - Mayagüez (UPRM) has taken center stage in the Computer Engineering program in just three years. This growth has been reflected in the academic programs, research, facilities, faculty, and students. Our research and academic emphasis is on usability engineering and programming of user interfaces.