All the work of the hand is rooted in thinking. -David Sudnow
For the iSchool Open House I’ll be presenting my on going investigation of gesture and touchless interaction in medical workplaces.
Video: History of Cardiac Electrophysiology
“History of Cardiac Electrophysiology” presented by Vuay K. Ramu, M.D.
Originally recorded on September 13, 2011
The layout of EP: a description of space
There are a number of material arrangements of equipment. The arrangements are determined in a large part by what equipment the lab holds. For instance a stereotaxis machine is roughly the size of a compact car. The types of equipment present in a lab are related to what types of procedures the lab preforms or has performed in the past. This makes analyzing the layout of an EP lab a rather idiosyncratic task. The description will depend to a large degree on what sort of lab one has access to.
However, I’ve learned through my informal engagements with EP lab workers that these materials arrangements actually fall into two categories related to two ways EP medical teams are formed and how and which team members fill the role of performing catheter work.
Defining an area of Research: Gesture and Movement in EP
Drawing on socio-technical understandings of workplace [2, 5], my research contributes an in-depth look at the movement of bodies in a surgical environment. This is motivated by a discomfort with how the HCI community has defined and evaluated “natural user interfaces” and “embodied interactions”. Both descriptors make weighty claims about the configuration of human and machine. The SST community is especially sensitive to the complexities in the organization of action in systems [1] and so it is with this lens I have looked into a field where new computing inputs will shortly be introduced [4]. We in the gesture research community might consider video of such prototype systems a call to action. The SST literature has demonstrated it is possible to take a more nuanced view of interaction through close observation, including studies of science labs and hospitals [5, 4, 7]. So what would my research contribute?
A note on Medical Workplaces
Medical workplaces are a compelling setting for interaction design. They are compelling because they are important. The work done in medical workplaces has noble overtones (Sethuraman, 2006). Thus the design of technologies supporting valuable work also taken on this air of social good. However there are many other motivations for designing for medical workplaces.
Defining Catheter Work
A catheter is “a tubular medical device for insertion into canals, vessels, passageways, or body cavities for diagnostic or therapeutic purposes (as to permit injection or withdrawal of fluids or to keep a passage open)” (catheter, n.d.).
The catheter is a fundamental part of work in cardiac electrophysiology (EP), so much so that often an EP lab is referred to as the “Cath Lab.” The purpose of this document is to define catheter work and why it is important to understand the socio-technical configuration of work in an EP lab.
Presentation: A comparision of image us in interventional radiology and electrophysiology
This study of electrophysiology began with a simple case study. This presentation reviews the findings of that case study. What is compared is image use in two different image guided procedures, interventional radiology and electrophysiology. This approach was taken because there is a rich body of qualitative studies on a variety of image guided procedures, but none on electrophysiology. The purpose of this study was to determine to what extent the settings are comparable and importantly where they differ.
The control and procedure rooms share a wall. The floorplans of the EP demonstrate how those in the control room can view through a window the activities in the procedure room. Besides windows and doors that connect these spaces several technologies in these rooms help the team communicate, like intercoms and computer systems, however what these diagrams outline that it is also the arrangement of these technologies that help the team communicate. Notice the redundancy in the information displayed on the monitors. But notice as well how the boom in them procedure room shares the same arrangement of the monitors in the control room. This is just a small example of the complex social and technical configuration of space that makes EP work in a distributed environment run smoothly.
What does electorphysiology look like? This is a collection of photos gathered on the internet of the medical workplace of interest.
