Cognitive assessment platform (CAP): Capturing physiological interaction parameters of caregivers during stressful ICU interventions, towards the development of dynamic caregivers' assistant interfaces (CAI).

An intensive care unit (ICU) is a safety critical environment where caregivers' activities are crucial to human lives. Adverse events, defined as injuries or complications that are provoked by a medical human error rather than the patient's underlying disease, occur in about one-third of cases in adult ICU patients and the risk of error is cumulative. The risk factors of adverse events include high nursing workload, caregivers' sleep deprivation or fatigue, communication failure, a high patient-to-nurse ratio and poor management. Work-related stress with the accompanying emotions provoked specifically in ICU is well documented. Nonetheless, only few studies have utilized physiological measures regarding research conducted on stress on medical caregivers.Within this project, it is aimed to develop a cognitive assessment platform (CAP) which comprises wearable sensors to enable monitoring of physiological parameters and location in real-time of caregivers within an ICU. This allows creating cognitive states of caregivers, linked to time and place. Workload, fatigue and stress are the monitored cognitive states, as they are the most significant threats towards patient safety. This innovative approach will allow us to correlate the cognitive states of caregivers with specific locations at the ICU, TISS-28, tasks and episodes during their working day and night, which will provide new insights and better understanding of the workflow of the ICU caregivers. Ultimately, this research may provide rich opportunities for examination and discovery in optimising the workflow of ICU caregivers.

Keywords:DESIGN RESEARCH, DESIGN FOR INTERACTION

Disciplines:Biosensors, Smart sensors, Human-centred design, Nursing in general medicine and medical specialisms, Cognitive processes