New hardware platforms for healthcare consultations

Innovative hardware platforms such as Mobile Clinical Assistants and tabletop computers are emerging that have the potential to significantly impact the interaction between clinician and patient. This position paper describes the results of interviews undertaken with General Practitioners as part of an experimental study to explore how innovative hardware platforms impact patient-clinician communication. We reflect on the lessons learnt from the study, both in terms of the implications for the design of such studies and possible directions for the introduction of new hardware technologies into healthcare consultations

PaperChain: A Collaborative Healthcare System Grounded in Field Study Work

In this extended abstract we summarise our recent experiences of designing and deploying PaperChain, a system to support real-time information sharing in healthcare work. A guiding principle has been the development of a deep understanding of the work as the foundation for effective system design. We summarise the field work that motivated the development of PaperChain, some of the key findings and the resulting system. We briefly reflect on the benefits gained from undertaking substantial HCI work in the design of a healthcare system

Circum-Arctic lithosphere-basin evolution : An overview

Acknowledgements The Special Issue editors thank the contributors for their hard work and dedication in the preparation of the papers presented here, and also Victoria Pease for her active support throughout the process and in particular in co-convening the conference session giving rise to this Special Issue. In particular, we thank the Editor-in-chief, Dr. Rob Govers for his patience, guidance and valued advice throughout the process. Also, we appreciate the work of the Tectonophysics editorial and production teams for bringing the Special Issue to print. R. Ernst, G. Oakey and an anonymous reviewer provided a multitude of helpful suggestions to improve the manuscript. This Special Issue is a contribution to the Geological Survey of Canada's Geomapping for Energy and Minerals (GEM2) Program, Canada's Extended Continental Shelf Program, and the Circum-Arctic Lithosphere Evolution (CALE) network. ESS Contribution No. 20160152.Peer reviewedPostprin

Reconceptualising clinical handover: Information sharing for situation awareness

Copyright & reuse City University London has developed City Research Online so that its users may access the research outputs of City University London's staff. Copyright © and Moral Rights for this paper are retained by the individual author(s) and / or other copyright holders. Users may download and / or print one copy of any article(s) in City Research Online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. Users may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. All material in City Research Online is checked for eligibility for copyright before being made available in the live archive. URLs from City Research Online may be freely distributed and linked to from other web pages. Versions of research The version in City Research Online may differ from the final published version. Users are advised to check the Permanent City Research Online URL above for the status of the paper. Enquiries If you have any enquiries about any aspect of City Research Online, or if you wish to make contact with the author(s) of this paper, please email the team at [email protected]

Public yet private: the status, durability and visibility of handover sheets

Drawing on data from a multi-site case study of a range of clinical settings, this paper explores the form of nursing handover sheets and the processes through which they are created and updated. We argue that these documents function as both public and private documents, having relevance for the whole ward while also acting as a personal workspace. Such dual functionality needs to be supported by any technology that seeks to provide for the work of handover, if the handover sheet is to continue to act as a space for work, rather than just a repository of information

The ConStratO model of handover: a tool to support technology design and evaluation

Handovers are a specific kind of multidisciplinary team meeting. Shift handovers and transfers are both regular features of hospital work but there is currently great variation in how such handovers are conducted, presenting a challenging for those seeking to develop technology to support handover. This paper presents the ConStratO model of handover, which captures aspects of the context that influence how the handover is conducted, a range of different handover strategies relating to different aspects of the handover, and possible outcomes of handover. The model is based on detailed data collection in a range of clinical settings. We present the model as a tool for developing and evaluating technology support for handover

Automatic thresholding from the gradients of region boundaries

We present an approach for automatic threshold segmentation of greyscale images. The procedure is inspired by a reinterpretation of the strategy observed in human operators when adjusting thresholds manually and interactively by means of ‘slider’ controls. The approach translates into two methods. The first one is suitable for single or multiple global thresholds to be applied globally to images and consists of searching for a threshold value that generates a phase whose boundary coincides with the largest gradients in the original image. The second method is a variation, implemented to operate on the discrete connected components of the thresholded phase (i.e. the binary regions) independently. Consequently, this becomes an adaptive local threshold procedure, which operates relative to regions, rather than to local image subsets as is the case in most local thresholding methods previously published. Adding constraints for specifying certain classes of expected objects in the images can improve the output of the method over the traditional ‘segmenting first, then classify’ approach.The research reported in this paper was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), UK through funding under grant EP/M023869/1 ‘Novel contextbased segmentation algorithms for intelligent microscopy’

Ontological Levels in Histological Imaging

Paper presented at the 9th edition of the Formal Ontology in Information Systems conference, FOIS 2016, July 6–9, 2016, Annecy, FranceThis is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from IOS Press via the DOI in this record.In this paper we present an ontological perspective on ongoing work in histological and histopathological imaging involving the quantitative and algorithmic analysis of digitised images of cells and tissues. We present the derivation of consistent histological models from initially captured images of prepared tissue samples as a progression through a number of ontological levels, each populated by its distinctive classes of entities related in systematic ways to entities at other levels. We see this work as contributing to ongoing efforts to provide a consistent and widely accepted suite of ontological resources such as those currently constituting the OBO Foundry, and where possible we draw links between our work and existing ontologies within that suite.This research is supported by EPSRC through funding under grant EP/M023869/1 “Novel context-based segmentation algorithms for intelligent microscopy”

Safe use of symbols in handover documentation for medical teams

Concern has been reported about the safe use of medical abbreviations in documents such as handover sheets and medical notes, especially when information is being communicated between staff of different specialties (BBC 2008, Sheppard et al. 2008). This article describes a study to investigate whether the use of symbols in handover documentation that is shared within and between multidisciplinary teams (MDTs) has similar safety implications. We asked 19 healthcare professionals from a range of specialties to identify 45 different combinations of 38 individual symbols. The symbols and combinations of symbols were extracted from 102 handover sheets taken from 6 different healthcare contexts in 4 London hospitals. Three symbols proposed in Microsoft's Common User Interface guidelines for alert symbols were also included. Results reveal that while some symbols are well understood, many others are either ambiguous or unknown. These results have implications for the safe use of symbols in medical documents, including paper and electronic handover documents and Electronic Patient Records (EPRs), especially where teams comprise individuals from different professional backgrounds, i.e. MDTs. We offer initial suggestions for standardisation and further research

Evaluating New Interactions in Healthcare: Challenges and Approaches

New technologies for supporting the provision of healthcare are increasingly pervasive. While healthcare computing previously referred to a desktop computer within the consulting room, we are now seeing an ever broader range of software, hardware and settings. This workshop is concerned with how to conduct evaluations which allow assessment of the overall impact of technology. The workshop will explore challenges and approaches for evaluating new interactions in healthcare. In this paper we outline the goals for this workshop and summarize the issues and questions it intends to explore