Thomas Riisgaard Hansen

AwareMedia: a shared interactive display supporting social, temporal, and spatial awareness in surgery

Several CSCW studies have shown that coordination of work in hospitals is particular challenging, and that clinicians put much effort into maintaining mutual awareness on the flow of work. Despite these apparent challenges, very little work has been done to design technology which helps people coordinate highly cooperative work in such a critical setting. In this paper we propose a novel way of supporting coordination in this hectic and time-critical environment. AwareMedia is a system which promotes social, spatial, and temporal awareness in combination with a shared messaging system. AwareMedia runs on large interactive displays situated around the hospital, and it is designed especially to support coordination at an operation ward. We present the design, implementation, and deployment of AwareMedia and based on preliminary data from our on-going deployment, we discuss how AwareMedia is working in-situ.

Healthcare in everyday life: designing healthcare services for daily life

Today the design of most healthcare technology is driven by the considerations of healthcare professionals and technology companies. This has several benefits, but we argue that there is a need for a supplementary design approach on the basis the citizen and his or her everyday life. An approach where the main focus is to develop healthcare technology that fits the routines of daily life and thus allows the citizens to continue with the activities they like and have grown used to -- also with an aging body or when managing a chronic condition. Thus, with this approach it is not just a matter of fixing a health condition, more importantly is the matter of sustaining everyday life as a whole. This argument is a result from our work -- using participatory design methods -- on the development of supportive healthcare technology for elderly people and for diabetic, pregnant women.

Moving Out of the Lab: Deploying Pervasive Technologies in a Hospital

This article reports our experiences with deploying the iHospital system, a hospital scheduling and awareness system. We built the system to support the often intense coordination of operations in a large hospital, and to this end, it incorporates location tracking, a context-awareness system, large interactive displays, and mobile phones

Experiences from real-world deployment of context-aware technologies in a hospital environment

Context-aware computing is a central concept in ubiquitous computing and many suggestions for context-aware technologies and applications have been proposed. There is, however, little evidence on how these concepts and technologies play out in a real-world setting. In this paper we describe and discuss our experiences from an ongoing deployment of a suite of context-aware technologies and applications in a hospital environment, including a context-awareness infrastructure, a location tracking system, and two context-aware applications running on interactive wall displays and mobile phones. Based on an analysis of the use of these systems, we observe that many of the ideas behind context-aware computing are valid, and that the context-aware applications are useful for clinicians in their work. By reflecting on the nature of the designed context-aware technologies, we present a model which states that the triggering of context-awareness actions depend upon the accuracy of the sensed context information, the degree to which you know which action to perform in a given situation, and the consequence of performing the action.

Mixed interaction space: designing for camera based interaction with mobile devices

In mobile devices, such as mobile phones and PDAs, an integrated camera can be used to interact with the device in new ways. In this paper we introduce the term mixed interaction space and argue that the possibility of using mixed interaction spaces is what distinguishes camera-based interaction from other types of sensor-based interaction on mobile devices. We present our implemented applications, and related work that use mixed interaction spaces. Based on this we address how mixed interaction spaces can have different identities, be mapped to applications, and how it can be visualized.

The eDiary: Bridging home and hospital through healthcare technology

The main contribution of the paper is to present challenges relating to the use of new healthcare technology, the eDiary, which seeks to create a better integration between home and hospital. To minimise risks of malformations and other complications, pregnant women with diabetes are enrolled in an extensive treatment regime, which requires frequent visits to an outpatient clinic as well as a high degree of self-care. The eDiary is designed to assist the women in this work, primarily by allowing the women to register their glucose values, record video consultations, and support video-tele-consultations. This paper reports on a pilot study during which pregnant women with diabetes and their healthcare providers make use of the eDiary. The pilot study indicates that such healthcare technology not only allows the women to achieve a better integration of the management of their diabetes into their everyday life, but may also challenge existing power relations between patients and healthcare providers.

Reclaiming public space: designing for public interaction with private devices

Public spaces are changing from being ungoverned places for interaction to be more formalized, controlled, less interactive, and designed places aimed at fulfilling a purpose. Simultaneously, new personal mobile technology aims at providing private individual spaces in the public domain. In this paper we explore the implications of interacting in public space and how technology can be rethought to not only act as personal devices, but be the tool to reclaim the right and possibility to interact in public spaces. We introduce information exchange, social support and regulation as three central aspects for reclaiming public space. The PhotoSwapper application is presented as an example of a system designed to integrate pervasive technology in a public setting. The system is strongly inspired by the activities at a traditional market place. Based on the design of the application we discuss four design challenges when designing for public interaction.

Strings of experiments: looking at the design process as a set of socio-technical experiments

In this paper I show how the classical notion of an experiment can be used as a metaphor to describe and guide the design process. I present socio-technical experiments as a type of experiments that emphasis both the sociological and the technical part of a design. I argue that focusing on socio-technical experiments can greatly benefit in addressing three core identified challenges.The socio-technical challenge focus on how to design with a combined technical and social view, the multidisciplinary challenge is about how to structure design processes in multidisciplinary teams and the translating challenge addresses how to design for a context that is going to change with the introduction of the new design.Further more boundary zones are presented as an extension of the term boundary objects that address how different design representation are handed over and used between different professions within the design team.

Use your head: exploring face tracking for mobile interaction

In this paper we present how face tracking can be implemented on mobile devices. Our main contribution is to present how face tracking on mobile systems can be used as a multi-dimensional input technique and to demonstrate how this can be used in different mobile applications. We present at set of different applications based on the tracking, and discuss current and future advantages, challenges and problems with face tracking as input device for mobile systems.

ActiveTheatre: a collaborative, event-based capture and access system for the operating theatre

Building capture and access (C&A) applications for use in the operation theatre differs greatly from C&A applications built to support other settings e.g. meeting rooms or classrooms. Based on field studies of surgical operations, this paper explores how to design C&A applications for the operation theatre. Based on the findings from our field work, we have built the ActiveTheatre, a C&A prototype. ActiveTheatre is built to support collaboration in and around the operating theatre, to capture events instead of automatically capturing everything, and to be integrated with existing applications already present in the operation theatre. The ActiveTheatre prototype has been developed in close co-operation with surgeons and nurses at a local hospital. The work on the prototype and our initial evaluations have provided an insight into how to design, capture and access applications that are going to be used in other settings than the meeting room.