Emergency Response Virtual Environment for Safe Schools

An intelligent emergency response virtual environment (ERVE) that provides emergency first responders, response planners, and managers with situational awareness as well as training and support for safe schools is presented. ERVE incorporates an intelligent agent facility for guiding and assisting the user in the context of the emergency response operations. Response information folders capture key information about the school. The system enables interactive 3D visualization of schools and academic campuses, including the terrain and the buildings' exteriors and interiors in an easy to use Web..based interface. ERVE incorporates live camera and sensors feeds and can be integrated with other simulations such as chemical plume simulation. The system is integrated with a Geographical Information System (GIS) to enable situational awareness of emergency events and assessment of their effect on schools in a geographic area. ERVE can also be integrated with emergency text messaging notification systems. Using ERVE, it is now possible to address safe schools' emergency management needs with a scaleable, seamlessly integrated and fully interactive intelligent and visually compelling solution

A Design Thinking Framework for Human-Centric Explainable Artificial Intelligence in Time-Critical Systems

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has seen a surge in popularity as increased computing power has made it more viable and useful. The increasing complexity of AI, however, leads to can lead to difficulty in understanding or interpreting the results of AI procedures, which can then lead to incorrect predictions, classifications, or analysis of outcomes. The result of these problems can be over-reliance on AI, under-reliance on AI, or simply confusion as to what the results mean. Additionally, the complexity of AI models can obscure the algorithmic, data and design biases to which all models are subject, which may exacerbate negative outcomes, particularly with respect to minority populations. Explainable AI (XAI) aims to mitigate these problems by providing information on the intent, performance, and reasoning process of the AI. Where time or cognitive resources are limited, the burden of additional information can negatively impact performance. Ensuring XAI information is intuitive and relevant allows the user to quickly calibrate their trust in the AI, in turn improving trust in suggested task alternatives, reducing workload and improving task performance. This study details a structured approach to the development of XAI in time-critical systems based on a design thinking framework that preserves the agile, fast-iterative approach characteristic of design thinking and augments it with practical tools and guides. The framework establishes a focus on shared situational perspective, and the deep understanding of both users and the AI in the empathy phase, provides a model with seven XAI levels and corresponding solution themes, and defines objective, physiological metrics for concurrent assessment of trust and workload

Understanding Disaster Recovery Planning through a Theatre Metaphor: Rehearsing for a Show that Might Never Open

Disaster recovery planning for organizations is fundamental and often urgent. Planning supports the firm\u27s ability to recover the core business functionality of its software, data, and systems after the occurrence of a natural or man-made disaster. Organizations must take steps to protect their software, systems and data backups from natural disasters, power outages, and even terrorist attacks. However the issue of disaster recovery is often awash in checklists or marooned in mundane statistics. Such sterile approaches tend to lead key managers, CEOs, and CIOs to relegate disaster recovery planning to a lower priority when they become overwhelmed with planning minutiae or bored with staid presentations. This paper introduces a theatre metaphor to enable a lively discussion and deeper understanding of disaster recovery planning. Specifically, we introduce the concept of workshopping a play. We explore this new approach from the world of theatrical productions to illuminate and deepen understanding of the importance of testing, evaluation, and reworking of scenarios for each potential disaster

Improving Usability and Adoption of Tablet-based Electronic Health Record (EHR) Applications

abstract: The technological revolution has caused the entire world to migrate to a digital environment and health care is no exception to this. Electronic Health Records (EHR) or Electronic Medical Records (EMR) are the digital repository for health data of patients. Nation wide efforts have been made by the federal government to promote the usage of EHRs as they have been found to improve quality of health service. Although EHR systems have been implemented almost everywhere, active use of EHR applications have not replaced paper documentation. Rather, they are often used to store transcribed data from paper documentation after each clinical procedure. This process is found to be prone to errors such as data omission, incomplete data documentation and is also time consuming. This research aims to help improve adoption of real-time EHRs usage while documenting data by improving the usability of an iPad based EHR application that is used during resuscitation process in the intensive care unit. Using Cognitive theories and HCI frameworks, this research identified areas of improvement and customizations in the application that were required to exclusively match the work flow of the resuscitation team at the Mayo Clinic. In addition to this, a Handwriting Recognition Engine (HRE) was integrated into the application to support a stylus based information input into EHR, which resembles our target users’ traditional pen and paper based documentation process. The EHR application was updated and then evaluated with end users at the Mayo clinic. The users found the application to be efficient, usable and they showed preference in using this application over the paper-based documentation.Dissertation/ThesisMasters Thesis Computer Science 201

Immersive analytics for oncology patient cohorts

This thesis proposes a novel interactive immersive analytics tool and methods to interrogate the cancer patient cohort in an immersive virtual environment, namely Virtual Reality to Observe Oncology data Models (VROOM). The overall objective is to develop an immersive analytics platform, which includes a data analytics pipeline from raw gene expression data to immersive visualisation on virtual and augmented reality platforms utilising a game engine. Unity3D has been used to implement the visualisation. Work in this thesis could provide oncologists and clinicians with an interactive visualisation and visual analytics platform that helps them to drive their analysis in treatment efficacy and achieve the goal of evidence-based personalised medicine. The thesis integrates the latest discovery and development in cancer patients’ prognoses, immersive technologies, machine learning, decision support system and interactive visualisation to form an immersive analytics platform of complex genomic data. For this thesis, the experimental paradigm that will be followed is in understanding transcriptomics in cancer samples. This thesis specifically investigates gene expression data to determine the biological similarity revealed by the patient's tumour samples' transcriptomic profiles revealing the active genes in different patients. In summary, the thesis contributes to i) a novel immersive analytics platform for patient cohort data interrogation in similarity space where the similarity space is based on the patient's biological and genomic similarity; ii) an effective immersive environment optimisation design based on the usability study of exocentric and egocentric visualisation, audio and sound design optimisation; iii) an integration of trusted and familiar 2D biomedical visual analytics methods into the immersive environment; iv) novel use of the game theory as the decision-making system engine to help the analytics process, and application of the optimal transport theory in missing data imputation to ensure the preservation of data distribution; and v) case studies to showcase the real-world application of the visualisation and its effectiveness

Enhancing Seamless Nurses-Physician Communication After-Hours with Google Glass

There is a major issue in medical centres in Malaysia: the shared responsibility and communication between nurses at the bedside care and conversation with the physicians after-hours. Inexperience nurses may, sometimes, overlook patients' critical symptoms that indicate immediate medical care and cause the circumstance deteriorate. Therefore, mutual blaming practices are common if there is a medical error. The design of hands-free assessment and feedback with wearable technologies is welcomed in healthcare sector. Hence, the paper presents a pilot design that investigates how a wearable technology can help in daily patient care in an innovative way that enhance the nurses and physicians' communication. The paper reviewed the current practices and technologies, followed by the design of the transformed flow, hardware and apps used with technical limitations, pilot evaluation and future work

First steps toward voice user interfaces for web-based navigation of geographic information: A Spanish terms study

This work presents the first steps toward developing specific technology for voice user interfaces for geographic information systems. Despite having many general elements, such as voice recognition libraries, the current technology still lacks the ability to fully understand and process the semantics that real users apply to command geographic information systems. This paper presents the results of three connected experiments, following a mixed-methods approach. The first experiment focused on identifying the most common words used when working with maps in a web browser. The second experiment developed an understanding of the chain of commands used for map management for a specific objective. Finally, the third experiment involved the development of a prototype to validate this understanding. Using data and fieldwork, we created a minimum corpus of terms in Spanish. In addition, we identified the particularities of use and user profiles to consider in a voice user interface for geographic information systems, involving the user’s proprioception concerning the world and technology. These user profiles can be considered in future designs of human–technology interaction products. All the data collected and the source code of the prototype are provided as additional material, free to use and modify

Using immersive video environment simulations for calibration of evacuation models

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Geospatial TechnologiesThis thesis explores the potential of Immersive Video Environment (IVE) simulations for studying evacuation behavior and calibration parameters of evacuation models. Crowd disasters have increased in frequency and intensity and have resulted in many casualties in recent years. These disasters can occur at different scenarios and are caused by a myriad of reasons. Over the years, the methods to study the evacuation behavior have evolved and evacuation models are extensively used. There are many kinds of models that are used, however there are many issues faced in the calibration of these models. The reason for the problems in calibration mostly stem from a scarcity of data related to evacuation behavior. It is difficult to conduct evacuation drills and gather data from actual evacuations. Virtual Reality (VR), in particular the IVE can help bridge this gap by allowing for systematic studies, that are safe, reliable and with high ecological validity to be conducted. To study the viability of IVE simulations for this, a user study was conducted to observe the evacuation behavior and see the impact of building familiarity and visibility on evacuation performance. The impact of building familiarity and visibility was studied on the Route Choice, Exit Choice, Decision Time, Total Evacuation Time and User errors. The results of the study showed that the evacuation performance increases with building familiarity and is reduced when the visibility is low, this is much more apparent when the users are not familiar with the building. The study also established the Route Choice as being the main contributing factor to the Total Evacuation Time and showed that in most of the cases (75% of the time) the people not familiar with the building chose familiar exits while the people familiar with the building chose emergency exits. The results of the study coincide with the existing literature and show that the use of IVE simulations is a viable method for studying evacuation behavior and calibration parameters for evacuation models

TURF for Teams: Considering Both the Team and I in the Work-Centered Design of Systems

Teams are an inherent part of many work domains, especially in the healthcare environment. Yet, most systems are often built with only the individual user in mind. How can we better incorporate the team, as a user, into the design of a system? By better understanding the team, through their user, task, representational, and functional needs, we can create more useful and helpful systems that match their work domain. For this research project, we utilize the TURF framework and expanded it further by also considering teams as a user, thus, creating the TURF for Teams framework. In addition, we chose to examine teams in the emergency department environment. We believe that designing a system with the team also fully incorporated and acknowledged in the work domain will be beneficial for supporting necessary team activities. Using TURF for Teams, we first conducted an observational field study in the emergency department to get a better understanding of the users, teams, tasks, workload, and interactions. We then identified the need for team communications to be better supported, especially in the management of interruptions, and further categorized the interruptions by their function in order to design a team tool that could help team members better manage their interruptions by focusing on the necessary, or domain, types of interruptions and more easily disregarding the unnecessary, or overhead, types of interruptions. We then administered some surveys and conducted a card sort and cognitive walkthrough with emergency clinician participants to help us better identify how to design interfaces for the team tool and simulation that would better match the needs of team communication behaviors observed and reported by emergency clinicians. After designing and developing the team tool and simulation, we conducted an evaluation of this system by having emergency medicine, medicine, and informatics graduate student teams go through the system and utilize the team tool and simulation as a team. Though we had a small sample size, we found that emergency medicine teams found the team tool and simulation to be very usable and they reacted favorably to its potential in helping them better understand and manage their team communications. In summary, we were able to utilize the TURF framework for incorporating teams into the design of systems, in this case a team communication tool and microworld simulation for the emergency department. Our findings suggest that TURF for Teams is a viable framework for designing useful and helpful team based systems for all work domains