Can I get a heads-up on that patient? Head-worn displays for patient monitoring

Doctors and nurses often move around their work area to monitor multiple patients and perform other tasks. Currently, patient and vital sign information is not easily accessible to clinicians, which can delay treatment. One way to support multitasking clinicians is to provide them with continuous patient information on a head-worn display (HWD). Clinicians may refer to a HWD at any time to see which patients and vital signs are outside a normal range and act appropriately. However, there is limited research into the factors that influence how effectively alerts are when presented on a HWD, especially when clinicians are multitasking. To date, there is no known research that examines the known advantage of stimuli visual contrast, in conjunction with perceptual task load in the patient monitoring context. In a 2 x 2 mixed design, we investigated the effects of stimuli visual contrast and perceptual-motor task load on participants’ ability to detect patient vital sign alerts on a HWD. Participants monitored patient vital signs on a HWD with either high or low visual contrast alerts, while they performed a manual tracking task imposing either heavy or light task loads. As predicted, we found that participants detected alerts faster in the high visual contrast condition than in the low visual contrast condition, and when task load was light than when task load was heavy. Furthermore, performance on the tracking task was better when task load was light than when it was heavy. Contrary to our prediction we found that participants’ tracking task performance was not affected by the level of visual contrast. These findings suggest that visual displays can be enhanced to help people detect the alerts while they perform another visual task. Future research should test to generalise the current findings to a clinical setting