| |
3.3. Wearable Assistant for Doctors
41 further shape
a prospective concept. The result might not necessarily have been
restricted to assembly but perhaps also might have included
some intelligent “furni- ture behavior”.
Nevertheless, the furniture prototype provided a particular ubiqui-
tous computing scenario and showed opportunities to think
about. This experience backed our belief:
“never go to a client meeting without a prototype” [
Schrage
2004 ] .
3.3 Wearable Assistant
for Doctors After this ”non-user
experience”from the furniture project, we followed the opposite
approach in the wearable assistant project: we teamed
up with users right from the beginning
of the project. The goal of this project
was to provide support to medical doctors in their every- day
work using wearable technology in a hospital environment. The project was
started using a ‘classical’ user-centered design
approach [ Beyer
and Holtzblatt 1998 ]
[ Greenbaum
and Kyng 1991 ]
: One member of the development team spent three
days together with medical doctors and observed the doctors
daily routines (see Section 3.3.2).
In a second step the doctor’s routines were analyzed
to find out where new technology could
improve the current work practice (see Section 3.3.3).
Starting from the anamnesis, where
statements of the patient are written down, over the examination
of the patient and the specification of the treatment
to the call-in of external experts. However,
the entire cooperation cycle finally had limited success, since the doctors
were not willing to abstract from and extrapolate beyond
their current routines. Only when we started
leaving the current work practices of the doctors, we found potential
for innovation (see Section 3.3.4).
3.3.1 Motivation: Why cooperating
with Doctors? The first motivation
to cooperate with medical doctors was that hospitals are a technology
friendly environment. Secondly, another starting-point was that doctors
are ‘on the move’ most of the time, e.g. visiting
patients, consulting experts, and having
meetings. Hence, a classical desktop computer that is stationary in a specific
room is little suited for their purposes, although it
is a common solution. The idea was to supply
them with a mobile device, a wearable computer that would support
them in their everyday work. Furthermore, we could partner
up with two doctors of the inner medicine
at the Zurich University Hospital. As the daily routine of a doctor
is quite complex, we concentrated on supporting patient admission interviews
and examinations.
|  |
|
| |
|
|
