“You Have a Message Here”: Enhancing Interpersonal Communication in a Hospital Ward with Location-based Virtual Notes

Summary

Objectives: This paper aims to explore how computerized interpersonal information can be mediated through the physical environment of hospital wards. Specifically, it focuses on a communication service (location-based virtual notes) that allows hospital workers to leave short digital messages at relevant physical locations (e.g. by a patient bed), so that intended colleagues can pick them up later when entering such a location. In a work setting where personnel move between various locations mainly as a result of work priority, improving timeliness of information and reducing the number of work interruptions is essential. Our objective is to provide a set of user-motivated design guidelines that address important usability aspects of the proposed communication service.

Methods: To get end user feedback, a prototype was built and tested in simulated scenarios with real hospital workers. The material gathered from the usability testing and following interviews was reviewed to identify critical usability issues.

Results: We identified a number of relevant usability issues concerning the applied design metaphor, posting of digital messages, role-based contact, and user control. These issues formed the basis for a set of preliminary design principles.

Conclusions: We view the preliminary usability guidelines as an incentive for more extensive research. Based on feedback from the test participants, we conclude that the location-based virtual notes have promising potential to improve timeliness of ad hoc information exchange between hospital workers.

Keywords

Clinical communication - context-awareness - mobile computing - point-of-care systems

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