Testing Senders' Visual Occlusion Model: Do Operators (Drivers) Really Predict During Visual Occlusion?

Objective: The present study tests the hypothesis that humans are capable of predicting the state of a system during visual occlusion, an assumption often made in models of sampling behaviour, but seldom tested.

Background: In 1967, John Senders introduced the visual occlusion paradigm to evaluate attentional demand of tasks such as automobile driving. Despite multiple studies employing this paradigm, the concept of operators actually being able to resolve uncertainty during occlusion by predicting system output has remained unvalidated.

Ergonomic design of new paramedic response bags.

A two phase project is described for redesigning and evaluating paramedic response bags, one of the key pieces of equipment used by emergency medical services. Adopting a user-centred approach, Phase I involved first educating active service paramedics about ergonomic principles, and then collaborating with them to conceptualise a new type of response bag, based on separate colour coded kits, each containing related equipment items. Phase II describes a formal evaluation study, involving simulated procedures with a patient mannequin and active service paramedics in a real ambulance.

A study of the efficacy of flashing lights to increase the salience of alcohol-gel dispensers for improving hand hygiene compliance.

Background: Many interventions have been implemented to improve hand hygiene compliance, each with varying effects and monetary costs. Although some previous studies have addressed the issue of conspicuousness, we found only 1 study that considered improving hand hygiene by using flashing lights.

Method: Our attention theory-based hypothesis tested whether a simple red light flashing at 2-3 Hz affixed to the alcohol gel dispensers, within the main hospital entrance, would increase hand hygiene compliance over the baseline rate.

Viewpoint animation with a dynamic tether for supporting navigation in a virtual environment.

Objective: This study examined the concept of dynamic viewpoint tethering for enhancing performance in 3-D avatar control tasks.

Background: Dynamic viewpoint tethering refers to a viewpoint animation technique that couples a display viewpoint to a controlled avatar through a virtual tether. A dynamic tether, modeled as a mass spring damper system, can potentially generate desirable viewpoint behavior because of its ability to produce frequency-separated viewpoint responses.

Modeling a medical environment: an ontology for integrated medical informatics design.

Modern medical environments have seen an increase in technological complexity and pressures of handling more patients with fewer resources, resulting in higher demands on medical practitioners. Medical informatics designers will have to focus on the problem of organizing medical information more effectively to enable practitioners to cope with these challenges. This article addresses this research problem for the particular area of medical problem solving in patient care.