Handheld versus wearable interaction design for professionals

Abstract

With the blooming of new available wrist-worn devices there are potentials for these to support the work done in many professional domains. One such domain is hospital service work. This paper explores two wearable prototypes' challenges and opportunities to support future hospital service work. This explorative study was conducted with 4 experienced hospital orderlies who interacted with an application across two wearable concepts, and one handheld smartphone in five scenarios, not involving patients, in a hospital environment. The interactions were recorded with a chestmounted camera afterwards semi-structured interviews with each participant were conducted. This study shows that wearable computers can effectively support the maintenance work of the orderlies and has domain-specific advantages over the handheld smartphone, e.g., the former support glancing at the task information. Furthermore, we outline aspects to aid designers of next generation wearable designs for hospital service work.

Accounting for the Invisible Work of Hospital Orderlies

“…In the following, we present the related work and our user studies. We then report on findings that extends earlier work [2,42] by highlighting a set of dynamic changes, workarounds and cross-boundary information sharing breakdowns and contingencies in orderlies' work practices. Based on our findings, we provide a set of recommendations to account for the orderlies' work practices in the design of CSCW systems to enhance their coordination and the overall organizational workflow.…”

“…In addition, Abraham and Reddy [1,2] describe the important role of orderlies in the coordination of patient transfers between different clinical departments. Orderlies perform diverse service (e.g., transporting patients, delivering goods) and emergency (e.g., perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation) tasks that often require high mobility (on foot or vehicles) and ad-hoc coordination [42].…”

“…Mobile technology has also been used to support the articulation work of secretaries and nurses regarding, e.g., booking tasks [5] or patient responsibility handover [25]. Recently, technology for supporting work practices of orderlies have been investigated through a bed-board tracking system [2], and a mobile phone based task booking system [42].…”

“…As such, there is a need to understand orderlies' cooperative work practices with other members of the information infrastructure. Based on an initial characterization of orderlies' work [2,42], we further describe the local (within) and global (across departments) work practices, beyond patient-transfers [4], and changes in orderlies workflow after the introduction of technology.…”

“…The work (e.g., registering appointments, monitoring patients, taking medication) performed by secretaries, nurses, patients, families, and "on-call" service workers, are examples of work that often remains in the background [28,41,48]. Making this work more visible [45], through technology [37,42], can support the practices of invisible workers and enforce its contribution.…”