Leslie Wu
Stanford University
Medical Checklists, Crisis Attention and Interactive Cognitive Aids

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Medical checklists improve performance in the volatile and complex domain of emergency medicine. Such cognitive aids are only now being adopted, in paper form, in hospitals and clinics across the world. I believe that software and interactive technologies offer the opportunity to improve and distribute these aids widely, with the hope of reducing medical errors and saving lives.

However, these new, software-based medical checklists must work seamlessly in uncertain, time-pressured scenarios. In these team-based, multitasking environments, a users' attention is limited. These attentional aspects of crisis computing---supporting highly trained teams as they respond to real-life emergencies---have been underexplored in the user interface community. This talk describes how we have begun to address these challenges with design prototyping, engineering, and scientific evaluation.

In this talk, I describe an interactive software system, iCogAid, that helps medical teams follow Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS) protocol, as they respond to emergency codes such as heart attacks in ORs or hospital wings. The design of this system was based on 18 months spent observing Stanford medical residents responding to simulated crises in high-fidelity medical simulators with realistic patient mannequins. I present data on the efficacy of dynamic and interactive aids for supporting doctors as they respond to simulated ACLS scenarios, under time- and attention- constraints, suggesting that our software-based iCogAid system effectively supports doctors' crisis attention and performance.

http://hci.stanford.edu/research/icogaid/ && http://cogaids.stanford.edu/

Leslie Wu is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Stanford University, advised by Stuart Card and Pat Hanrahan. Her research applies modern, mobile software technologies to addressing issues in public health and medicine. Her thesis work focuses on the development and evaluation of iCogAid: effective interfaces for crisis medical checklists and interactive cognitive aids. iCogAid is a joint collaboration between Dr. Larry Chu and Dr. Kyle Harrison at the Stanford School of Medicine (Anesthesia Informatics & Media Lab) and the Stanford Computer Science Human-Computer Interaction group, including Dr. Scott Klemmer, Ph.D. candidate Jesse Cirimele, and Dr. Stuart Card. You can follow Leslie on Twitter @1wu, or visit http://graphics.stanford.edu/~lwu2/