Raymond has research interests within the broad area of biomedical and health informatics, which is the application of digital technology in healthcare. This has involved the modelling, processing and visualisation of medical data to enhance clinical decision-making (mainly involving cardiology data such as the ECG).
He also has research interests in simulation-based training for medicine, usability engineering methods to improve medical devices (which include eye tracking and other psychophysiology metrics) and also Internet-based models for healthcare monitoring and interventions.
Raymond coordinates a User Experience Laboratory (www.ux-lab.org), which is an outlet for transferring usability engineering knowledge to the medical device industry and other industries. Raymond has been a grant holder on research projects funded by H2020 and FP7 programmes, InvestNI, Innovate UK, InterTrade Ireland and the Royal Irish Academy.
Raymond obtained his BSc and PhD in the School of Computing and Mathematics (Ulster University). Before his academic appointment, he worked in the IT industry as a Web Programmer and later held Research Associate positions in the subject areas of Connected Health and Computerised Electrocardiography.
Title: User interfaces in healthcare: Is poor ‘usability’ an epidemic?
Abstract
In recent decades, we have seen medical diagnostics and treatment move into a man-machine endeavour. This is due to the fact that medicine now heavily relies on digital technology and most of these ‘machines’ have a user interface that requires interaction from healthcare professionals. These user interfaces range from bedside physiological monitors and cardiac defibrillators to laboratory information systems that document patient information and indeed specimens in the pathology laboratory.
Given patient safety and the prevalence of medial errors have become a recent concern; the FDA and other organisations have developed policies and protocols for optimising the usability of medical devices. The usability of a medical device is crucial since a poor user interface can actually encourage user errors, which can lead to a fatality or increased morbidity.
This presentation will include human-machine interaction principles that can be used to engineer usability into a medical device. It will also include methodologies for measuring and quantifying the usability of a user interface. This will include the use of usability instruments, metrics, benchmarking techniques and quantitative analysis of ‘usability’ experiments. We will also explore how we can use psychophysiological metrics to measure the user experience, which can include the use of eye gaze metrics, GSR and even the heart rate of the user.