Safer User Interfaces: A Case Study in Improving Number Entry

Numbers are used in critical applications, including finance, healthcare, aviation, and of course in every aspect of computing. User interfaces for number entry in many devices (calculators, spreadsheets, infusion pumps, mobile phones, etc.) have bugs and design defects that induce unnecessary use errors that compromise their dependability. Focusing on Arabic key interfaces, which use digit keys 0-9-· usually augmented with correction keys, this paper introduces a method for formalising and managing design problems. Since number entry and devices such as calculators have been the subject of extensive user interface research since at least the 1980s, the diverse design defects uncovered imply that user evaluation methodologies are insufficient for critical applications. Likewise, formal methods are not being applied effectively. User interfaces are not trivial and more attention should be paid to their correct design and implementation. The paper includes many recommendations for designing safer number entry user interfaces

Cybersecurity problems in a typical hospital (and probably in all of them)

A criminal case balancing on the corruption of patient data in a UK hospital resulted in some nurses being acquitted and some given community service and custodial sentences. This paper explains the background, demonstrates the inability of hospital IT systems to provide reliable evidence, and highlights broader problems with IT culture affecting manufacturers, hospitals, police, legal advisors — and ultimately misleading clinicians and compromising delivery of care. The NHS (and healthcare more generally) urgently needs to improve its IT awareness, management and policies. The police and the legal system need a more mature approach to IT. Manufacturers need to provide dependable systems that are fit for purpose for complex hospital environments. Regulators should ensure that systems meet better standards of quality and dependability. This paper includes recommendations; the most fundamental being that hospitals acknowledge that IT is unreliable and they should procure and manage equipment with this in mind. In particular, mature and effective data protection and cybersecurity policies must be in place and used proactively. When problems occur, evidence derived from IT (whether systems or devices) must not be used in legal or disciplinary investigations without extreme care and independent proof of provenance

Technology and the future of healthcare

Healthcare changes dramatically because of technological developments, from anesthetics and antibiotics to magnetic resonance imaging scanners and radiotherapy. Future technological innovation is going to keep transforming healthcare, yet while technologies (new drugs and treatments, new devices, new social media support for healthcare, etc) will drive innovation, human factors will remain one of the stable limitations of breakthroughs. No predictions can satisfy everybody; instead, this article explores fragments of the future to see how to think more clearly about how to get where we want to go

Improving Science That Uses Code

As code is now an inextricable part of science it should be supported by competent Software Engineering, analogously to statistical claims being properly supported by competent statistics.If and when code avoids adequate scrutiny, science becomes unreliable and unverifiable because results — text, data, graphs, images, etc — depend on untrustworthy code.Currently, scientists rarely assure the quality of the code they rely on, and rarely make it accessible for scrutiny. Even when available, scientists rarely provide adequate documentation to understand or use it reliably.This paper proposes and justifies ways to improve science using code:1. Professional Software Engineers can help, particularly in critical fields such as public health, climate change and energy.2. ‘Software Engineering Boards,’ analogous to Ethics or Institutional Review Boards, should be instigated and used.3. The Reproducible Analytic Pipeline (RAP) methodology can be generalized to cover code and Software Engineering methodologies, in a generalization this paper introduces called RAP+. RAP+ (or comparable interventions) could be supported and or even required in journal, conference and funding body policies.The paper’s Supplemental Material provides a summary of Software Engineering best practice relevant to scientific research, including further suggestions for RAP+ workflows.‘Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer.’ Donald E. Knuth in A=B [ 1]‘I have to write to discover what I am doing.’ Flannery O’Connor, quoted in Write for your life [ 2]‘Criticism is the mother of methodology.’ Robert P. Abelson in Statistics as Principled Argument [ 3]‘From its earliest times, science has operated by being open and transparent about methods and evidence, regardless of which technology has been in vogue.’ Editorial in Nature [4

Dependable keyed data entry for interactive systems

Keyed data entry is fundamental and ubiquitous, occurring when filling data fields in web forms, entering burglar alarm pass-codes, using calculators, entering drug delivery rates in infusion pumps, making cash withdrawals from cash machines, setting destinations for GPS navigation, to name but a few of its applications. Unfortunately data entry is often implemented poorly. We introduce divergence, a loss of predictability in a user interface, and show that it is in general unavoidable in data entry, and therefore a systematic approach is called for. This paper presents one such an approach. Many inter-related ideas ``fall into place''---e.g., autocompletion, prompting, automatic color coding---through the approach. The approach contrasts with conventional systems that are generally inconsistent and unhelpful to users, particularly after errors

From premature semantics to mature interaction programming

As HCI has progressed as a discipline, perhaps just as time has passed, the engineering work of programming has become increasingly separated from the HCI, the core user interface design work. At the same time, the sophistication of digital devices, across multiple dimensions, has grown exponentially. The result is that HCI and User Experience (UX) professionals and programmers now work in very different worlds. This separation causes problems for users: the UX is attractive but the program is unreliable, or the program is reliable but unattractive or unhelpful to use, correctly implementing the wrong thing. In this chapter, we dig down from this high-level view to get to what we identify as a new sort of fundamental problem, one we call premature semantics. Premature semantics must be recognised and understood by name by UX and HCI practitioners and addressed by programmers

Exploring unlikely errors using video games: An example in number entry research

A common and important feature of many safety critical interactive devices is number entry. In hospitals, number entry takes the form of setting drug parameters such as doses, volumes, etc. There are several ways a number entry interface can be designed - with different consequences for error and speed. Nurses and healthcare practitioners usually have to interact with different interfaces often under pressure and stress of taking care of patients with different health conditions. Error rates in practice are low, undetected error rates are even lower and obtaining the context in which the errors occur is often incredibly difficult due to poor logging systems in many medical devices and high cost of planning and conducting empirical studies. Laboratory based studies also suffer similar limitations in that, without interventions, error rates are also too low to study. This paper explores the benefits of using a gaming context to study safety critical systems. We argue that a game paradigm provides a way that overcomes many of the problems of studying low error rates in safety critical systems and specifically for number entry in medical contexts

Displaying 3D images: algorithms for single-image random-dot

A new, simple, and symmetric algorithm can be implemented that results in higher levels of detail in solid objects than previously possible with autostereograms. In a stereoscope, an optical instrument similar to binoculars, each eye views a different picture and thereby receives the specific image that would have arisen naturally. An early suggestion for a color stereo computer display involved a rotating filter wheel held in front of the eyes. In contrast, this article describes a method for viewing on paper or on an ordinary computer screen without special equipment, although it is limited to the display of 3D monochromatic objects. (The image can be colored, say, for artistic reasons, but the method we describe does not allow colors to be allocated in a way that corresponds to an arbitrary coloring of the solid object depicted.) The image can easily be constructed by computer from any 3D scene or solid object description