Developing a System for Integraded Automatic Control of Mutiple Infusion Pumps:The Multiplex infusion system

Most errors in ICUs are related to intravenous (IV) therapy. Previous studies suggested that hard to operate infusion pumps and the high cognitive workload for ICU nurses contribute to these errors. Conventional IV therapy requires separate lumens for incompatible IV drugs. This often requires the placement of additional catheters, which increases infection risk and physical discomfort for the patient. In this thesis, a control system for multiple infusion pumps is proposed to reduce the problems with conventional IV therapy. The core idea behind this ‘Multiplex infusion’ system is reducing the number of required lumens by optimizing the number of IV drugs that are administered through a single lumen.A feasibility analysis showed that the Multiplex infusion system could significantly reduce the number of required lumens. A user interface for this system was designed with the goal of reducing the likelihood of errors by partially automating several tasks. In order to compare the usability of the new user interface with that of the conventional method of manually controlling multiple infusion pumps, a user based usability analysis was performed. Results indicated that the new user interface had an overall better usability and a significantly lower error rate