Modern society increasingly depends on the work of interdisciplinary teams using information and communication technology (ICT) to control complex systems with high reliability (for example, in airplane cockpits, traffic control rooms, and nuclear power plants). Engineered systems such as these are deterministic, with well-defined states and parameters of normal operation which allow control teams to achieve their goals through direct interaction with ICT. But when the focus is a natural (i.e., social or living) system rather than a machine, the control task imposes quite different cognitive demands which make the design, development, and integration of ICT more challenging. High-risk, fast-response medicine is an example of a work environment that deals with a natural system (the patient), where the need for effective ICT support is as high as for engineered systems. The goal of this research is to develop innovative approaches for real-time information presentation to support situation awareness and collaborative work by fast-response, interdisciplinary medical teams. In particular, the PI will examine how context-specific information should be presented to support such teamwork while accounting for team members' perceptual and cognitive limitations. To this end, she will focus on the team-dependent and information-intensive processes of evaluating critically ill patients in the high-risk medical domains of pediatric trauma and emergency resuscitation. The research will involve field studies, video review of medical events, design and development of display prototypes, and evaluation. Project outcomes will include conceptual and empirical understanding of awareness in fast-response medical teamwork, approaches for augmenting distributed cognition through interactive displays, lessons from the development of display prototypes for improving awareness of rapidly unfolding events and their progression, and lessons from evaluating such prototypes in real-world settings.
Broader Impacts: The research will contribute to and inform diverse scientific fields, including information presentation in dynamic environments that rely on interactive information presentation, human-computer interaction where work conditions limit direct interaction with information systems, and the automatic capture and integration of data arriving from multiple sources. Because this research crosses many disciplinary boundaries, it will serve as a platform for an integrated and interdisciplinary education and outreach program.
