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3.3. Wearable Assistant for Doctors
43
the patient. It is a routine job for the doctors that consumes a considerable part
of their time. Thirdly, the interview is accompanied by a Status Examination (see
Figure 3.5). The result of these three and further additional diagnostic steps (labo-
ratory, ECG, etc.) is fourthly synthesized in the so called ‘problem list’. Some 70%
of the patients cannot be treated without advice from a doctor that is external to
the department. Therefore, communication with other doctors is crucial. Most of
the consultations require the specialist to come to the station and have a look at the
patients themselves. Today, this is done in regular meetings, i.e. every afternoon a
di erent specialist is visiting the station. In urgent cases meetings are also scheduled
on demand.
Based on these findings, we could identify several opportunities for improving the
doctors’ work. However, as we investigated considerable time and e ort in under-
standing the doctors’ work practices, we were distracted too much by the details
of today’s practices. Thus, most of the opportunities were only incremental from a
technology point of view and only some were related to wearable computing.
In the end, we found three more interesting opportunities for improvement. Firstly,
the doctors desired to have information that is already available in the hospital
information system also at the patient’s bed. They basically wanted to have the
interface from their desktop PC available – which requires mainly engineering e ort
instead of wearable technology research. Secondly, we suggested to dictate the
summary online during the admission interview and/or examination. Thirdly, since
the doctors require advice of external specialists for about 70% of the patients, we
proposed to equip them with a communication device, that allows to send pictures
or short videos of the patients. As such a device does not exist today, the doctors
were undecided about its use and usefulness.
3.3.3 Changing Today’s Work Practices
From the three possibilities of change we identified, we chose to investigate the
second, dictating the summary online during the admission interview and/or ex-
amination in more detail. In our opinion, this choice provided the best trade-o
between technological advance and use for the doctors.
We tested the idea using a mock-up prototype experiment (see Figure 3.6). We
strapped a small “wearable computer” to the wrist of the doctor and asked him to
perform an admission interview and examination and dictate the summary online
as if he had a microphone attached to his collar.
The experiment was little appreciated by the doctors. They considered the solution
inappropriate because it did not allow for a synthesis step, in which they summarize
a host of observations in a concise summary. Furthermore, they considered the
approach as a technology-driven way of changing their work.
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