The role of user requirements research in medical device development

Aims and Objectives: This research aims to suggest a concise framework to help in the better conceptualisation and integration of users in the medical device development (MDD) process. The current economic, political and social climate concerning the matter of healthcare delivery has resulted in the emergence of numerous users and user groups for whom the healthcare system has not previously catered for. These users have created ambiguity for the designers and manufacturers of medical devices as the boundaries between their needs and requirements have blurred, outdating current methods of MDD to meet consumer needs. Research Design and Methodology: The research methodology begins primarily with conducting a literature search on the theories relating to user requirements and medical device development. The paper outlines these findings through initially describing users and user involvement and relating them to medical devices. The cross-disciplinary nature of healthcare influenced the investigation into multiple disciplines including; IT, Ergonomics – particularly participatory research, Psychology and Design. These disciplines expose various methods and processes, which are useful to user requirements research. These methods were analysed for their compatibility, and then used to construct a conceptual framework for user involvement in MDD. Results: The research insinuates the true significance of user involvement and hence resulted in the formation of a conceptual framework to aid user involvement in the MDD process. The framework is produced by the amalgamation of relevant methods examined across the disciplines, in a complimentary fashion. Conclusion: The originality of this research lies in its use of a multidisciplinary approach. Previous research claiming multi-methods has dealt with combining two disciplines or methods at a time i.e. Computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) with participatory research (Scandurra et al, 2008) for the needs analysis of healthcare professionals only. Collaboration across disciplines has also been investigated (Johnson et al, 2005), but this was for the purpose of redesign rather than initial designs. This framework can help medical device designers to fully access all user requirements through more extensive collaboration right at the start. It reduces the risk of high costs involved in device rejection, usually associated with belated recognition of user needs in the design cycle

You can't always sketch what you want: Understanding Sensemaking in Visual Query Systems

Visual query systems (VQSs) empower users to interactively search for line charts with desired visual patterns, typically specified using intuitive sketch-based interfaces. Despite decades of past work on VQSs, these efforts have not translated to adoption in practice, possibly because VQSs are largely evaluated in unrealistic lab-based settings. To remedy this gap in adoption, we collaborated with experts from three diverse domains---astronomy, genetics, and material science---via a year-long user-centered design process to develop a VQS that supports their workflow and analytical needs, and evaluate how VQSs can be used in practice. Our study results reveal that ad-hoc sketch-only querying is not as commonly used as prior work suggests, since analysts are often unable to precisely express their patterns of interest. In addition, we characterize three essential sensemaking processes supported by our enhanced VQS. We discover that participants employ all three processes, but in different proportions, depending on the analytical needs in each domain. Our findings suggest that all three sensemaking processes must be integrated in order to make future VQSs useful for a wide range of analytical inquiries.Comment: Accepted for presentation at IEEE VAST 2019, to be held October 20-25 in Vancouver, Canada. Paper will also be published in a special issue of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) IEEE VIS (InfoVis/VAST/SciVis) 2019 ACM 2012 CCS - Human-centered computing, Visualization, Visualization design and evaluation method

An ontology co-design method for the co-creation of a continuous care ontology

Ontology engineering methodologies tend to emphasize the role of the knowledge engineer or require a very active role of domain experts. In this paper, a participatory ontology engineering method is described that holds the middle ground between these two 'extremes'. After thorough ethnographic research, an interdisciplinary group of domain experts closely interacted with ontology engineers and social scientists in a series of workshops. Once a preliminary ontology was developed, a dynamic care request system was built using the ontology. Additional workshops were organized involving a broader group of domain experts to ensure the applicability of the ontology across continuous care settings. The proposed method successfully actively engaged domain experts in constructing the ontology, without overburdening them. Its applicability is illustrated by presenting the co-created continuous care ontology. The lessons learned during the design and execution of the approach are also presented

Developing tomorrow's innovative surgical solutions

Designers are increasingly becoming aware of the potential use and integration of smart materials and technologies within their designs. One of the critical steps towards building innovative surgical solutions will be to link physicians and product designers utilising the appropriate materials and technologies to provide tangible improvements in patient care and treatment

Designing Reusable Systems that Can Handle Change - Description-Driven Systems : Revisiting Object-Oriented Principles

In the age of the Cloud and so-called Big Data systems must be increasingly flexible, reconfigurable and adaptable to change in addition to being developed rapidly. As a consequence, designing systems to cater for evolution is becoming critical to their success. To be able to cope with change, systems must have the capability of reuse and the ability to adapt as and when necessary to changes in requirements. Allowing systems to be self-describing is one way to facilitate this. To address the issues of reuse in designing evolvable systems, this paper proposes a so-called description-driven approach to systems design. This approach enables new versions of data structures and processes to be created alongside the old, thereby providing a history of changes to the underlying data models and enabling the capture of provenance data. The efficacy of the description-driven approach is exemplified by the CRISTAL project. CRISTAL is based on description-driven design principles; it uses versions of stored descriptions to define various versions of data which can be stored in diverse forms. This paper discusses the need for capturing holistic system description when modelling large-scale distributed systems.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure and 1 table. Accepted by the 9th Int Conf on the Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering (ENASE'14). Lisbon, Portugal. April 201

Applying a User-centred Approach to Interactive Visualization Design

Analysing users in their context of work and finding out how and why they use different information resources is essential to provide interactive visualisation systems that match their goals and needs. Designers should actively involve the intended users throughout the whole process. This chapter presents a user-centered approach for the design of interactive visualisation systems. We describe three phases of the iterative visualisation design process: the early envisioning phase, the global specification hase, and the detailed specification phase. The whole design cycle is repeated until some criterion of success is reached. We discuss different techniques for the analysis of users, their tasks and domain. Subsequently, the design of prototypes and evaluation methods in visualisation practice are presented. Finally, we discuss the practical challenges in design and evaluation of collaborative visualisation environments. Our own case studies and those of others are used throughout the whole chapter to illustrate various approaches

Where does the interaction break down? The stakeholder map of health IT systems development and use in Finland

Prior research shows that clinical users’ experience of healthcare IT systems in Finland is poor. Research shows further that physicians are highly critical of the perceived lack of user participation in systems development, but developers of the same systems argue that they do work with users and are highly interested in their views. This study aimed at mapping the stakeholders involved in the user–developer interaction network, in order to identify the spots where the interaction breaks down. A method for depicting the healthcare landscape was adapted for depicting the healthcare IT systems development landscape. Experts selected through purposive sampling were interviewed to identify stakeholders and problems. Content analysis was used to categorise problems into development spots. A stakeholder map was drawn, consisting of 22 organization types, nine activities within them, and two groups of individuals. Seven development spots were identified, within and between the healthcare provider and the software provider but also related to other stakeholders. A significantly larger number of stakeholders are involved in healthcare IT system development than what was initially evident. They all influence the end-user experience in some way. It is not only the software product itself (whether with good or bad usability), but also several other factors that may affect user experience. Further research can now focus on what can be done and by whom to address the development spots