Supporting Emergency Medical Care Teams with an Integrated Status Display Providing Real-Time Access to Medical Best Practices, Workflow Tracking, and Patient Data.

The work of a hospital's medical staff is safety critical and often occurs under severe time constraints. To provide timely and effective cognitive support to medical teams working in such contexts, guidelines in the form of best practice workflows for healthcare have been developed by medical organizations. However, the high cognitive load imposed in such stressful and rapidly changing environments poses significant challenges to the medical staff or team in adhering to these workflows. In collaboration with physicians and nurses from Carle Foundation Hospital, we first studied and modeled medical team's individual responsibilities and interactions in cardiac arrest resuscitation and decomposed their overall task into a set of distinct cognitive tasks that must be specifically supported to achieve successful human-centered system design. We then developed a medical Best Practice Guidance (BPG) system for reducing medical teams' cognitive load, thus fostering real-time adherence to best practices. We evaluated the resulting system with physicians and nurses using a professional patient simulator used for medical training and certification. The evaluation results point to a reduction of cognitive load and enhanced adherence to medical best practices.

Modelling and simulation of complex sociotechnical systems: envisioning and analysing work environments.

Accurate comprehension and analysis of complex sociotechnical systems is a daunting task. Empirically examining, or simply envisioning the structure and behaviour of such systems challenges traditional analytic and experimental approaches as well as our everyday cognitive capabilities. Computer-based models and simulations afford potentially useful means of accomplishing sociotechnical system design and analysis objectives. From a design perspective, they can provide a basis for a common mental model among stakeholders, thereby facilitating accurate comprehension of factors impacting system performance and potential effects of system modifications. From a research perspective, models and simulations afford the means to study aspects of sociotechnical system design and operation, including the potential impact of modifications to structural and dynamic system properties, in ways not feasible with traditional experimental approaches. This paper describes issues involved in the design and use of such models and simulations and describes a proposed path forward to their development and implementation. PRACTITIONER SUMMARY: The size and complexity of real-world sociotechnical systems can present significant barriers to their design, comprehension and empirical analysis. This article describes the potential advantages of computer-based models and simulations for understanding factors that impact sociotechnical system design and operation, particularly with respect to process and occupational safety.

Brunswikian resources for event-perception research.

Recent psychological research aimed at determining whether dynamic event perception is direct or mediated by cue-based inference convincingly demonstrates evidence of both modes of perception or apprehension. This work also shows that noise is involved in attaining any perceptual variable, whether it perfectly (invariantly) specifies or imperfectly (fallibly) indicates the value of a target or criterion variable. As such, event-perception researchers encounter both internal (sensory or inferential) and external ecological sources of noise or uncertainty, owing to the organism's possible use of imperfect or 'nonspecifying' variables (or cues) and cue-based inference. Because both sources play central roles in Egon Brunswik's theory of probabilistic functionalism and methodology of representative design, event-perception research will benefit by explicitly leveraging original Brunswikian and, more recent, neo-Brunswikian scientific resources. Doing so will result in a more coherent and powerful approach to perceptual and cognitive psychology than is currently displayed in the scientific literature.