Ida Löscher

Work Domain Analysis of an Intensive Care Unit: a study on how digitalization affects nurses’ work

During the spring Sara Carlson, from the master program in Human-Computer Interaction at Uppsala University, will work on her master thesis about how changes in a work system due to digitalization can be modelled. She will conduct observations and interviews with nurses at an intensive care unit to investigate the effect of the new system that have been implemented. She will explore how these changes can be modelled in an Abstraction Hierarchy from the Cognitive Work Analysis framework, and compare her results to an analysis of the same intensive care unit made prior the system implementation.

We are looking forward to work with Sara and her interesting study, more updates will come!

Would you like to read more blogs similar to this one?

Can’t wait for the next HTO blog post? Would you like to read more blogs similar to this one? There are a few more blogs connected to the HTO group. Maybe you did already find them; otherwise I will introduce them here:

Åsa Cajander – A blog on IT@work, HCI, Computer Science Education and Gender Equality in Academia

Åsa Cajander is an associate professor of human-computer interaction at Uppsala University, and the research leader of the HTO group. Åsa is also the coordinator of the DOME consortium that does research on the deployment of medical records online in Sweden, and she is the gender equality officer at the Department of Information Technology.

Her blog is frequently updated with a mix of shorter and longer posts about the latest news for the HTO group, the DOME consortium or any other part of Åsas work! Åsa writes that “In short this blog contains everything I am interested in at work!” and she describe her research area like this:

“I do research mainly from a socio-technical perspective in the following areas:

IT and work. Digitalisation has great potential to improve work and to increase work engagement. However, to develop and deploy ICT in organisations is difficult and often users think that the ICT is too complex and has major flaws.

Computer Science Education. I also do research on learning and didactics, and is part of the Uppsala Computing Education Research Group (UpCERG)”

You can also follow Åsa on Twitter as @AsaC and @DOMEprojekt

Jonas Moll – An academic blog

Jonas Moll is a postdoctoral researcher in human-computer interaction at Uppsala University, and his background is in computer science. Here you can read interesting reflections and detail descriptions on what is going on within the research projects or other things Jonas participates in. This is how Jonas describes his research area and his blog:

“My main research areas are computer mediated communication and collaboration in multimodal environments. A special interest lies in how haptic feedback can affect the communication and collaboration in collaborative virtual environments.

I am also one of the researchers within the DOME (Deployment of Online Medical records and E-health services) consortium, where I focus on how patients’ access to their medical records online affect the communication between patients and physicians.

I am also conducting pedagogical development studies related to the use of social media within the scope of higher education courses.

In this blog I will publish posts about my academic activities and interests, with special emphasis on multimodal interaction, eHealth and social media in higher education. I do this not only to show what I am currently working on, but also to force myself to reflect on and discuss what I am doing.”

You can also follow Jonas on Twitter as @Jonas_Moll

Diane Golay – PhD student in Human-Computer Interaction

Diane Golay is a PhD student within Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) at Uppsala University, and in this relatively new blog you can follow her refelections about subjects related to HCI and being a PhD student. She writes that “In this blog, I share my reflections, discoveries and tips related to my experience as a newbie in academia” and she describes her research area like this:

“My main research area is the use of ICT in the workplace. I am especially interested in investigating how ICT can be designed in order to fit workers’ needs and characteristics as well as how the use of ICT affects employee’s well-being, working conditions and professional identity. Within the framework of the DISA project, I currently focus on investigating how digitalization in healthcare affects nurses’ work environment.

A further research interest of mine is human-computer interaction (HCI) didactics. In my experience as a teaching assistant within that specific field, I was able to witness how difficult it is to make HCI’s core message come across, especially in regard with often sceptical computer science students. However, I believe it is essential for future software engineers to incorporate HCI methods and findings into their practice in order for better, more usable systems to be brought onto the market. Throughout my PhD studies, I thus hope to be able to take a closer look at how HCI-related skills can be taught to programming-oriented students.”

You can also follow Diane on Twitter as @DianeGolay

Christiane Grünloh – My Blog on Research, HCI, eHealth, and Academic Life

Christiane is a PhD student at TH Köln University of Applied Sciences (Germany) and KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm (Sweden). In her blog, she writes about her research in Human-Computer Interaction, eHealth services, teaching, and academic life in general.

I like to think of this blog as a tool and place for reflection, and as an opportunity to share things I learned that might be valuable for others as well.

You can also follow Christiane on Twitter as @c_gruenloh

The @htogroup also exist on Twitter, as well as these other HTO group members:

EIT Health/ACM SIGCHI eHealth Summer School 2017, week 2 in Stockholm and Uppsala

It was great to see everyone again at the second week of the EIT/SIGCHI summer school! It was now already three weeks ago, and I thought I should write a short blog post. The week started at the visualization studio at The Royal Institute of Technology, KTH, Stockholm. We had all prepared a Pecha Kucha – a two minutes presentation about ourselves. It was great to hear about everyone’s research! The afternoon was focused on action research, with discussions about the pros and cons and presentations by Bengt Sandblad from Uppsala University, and the organizers of the second summer school week Jan Gulliksen from KTH and Åsa Cajander from Uppsala University (and the HTO group).

The second day all participants travelled to Uppsala, and the lectures took place in Gustavianum which is the oldest building of Uppsala University. The themes of the day were medical records online and a new surgical planning system implemented at the University Hospital in Uppsala. The lectures were held by Benny Eklund, IT strategist at Uppsala county council, Birgitta Wallgren who is a manager at Uppsala University Hospital, and Gunnar Enlund, chief physician at Uppsala University Hospital. My colleagues Christiane Grünloh, Åsa Cajander, and Jonas Moll also presented results from their studies regarding medical records online!

Wednesday we were back in Stockholm and had a workshop most of the day. We started with trying out different technologies such as VR glasses and tabletop computers. After lunch we had a teamwork exercise where we all developed a computer game together. My group’s task was to create the game sounds and we had a lot of fun doing so, even if we discovered some mistakes when our work was integrated with the rest of the game.

Thursday and Friday we had lectures and also groupwork! It was a great week with many interesting lectures. Read more details about the week in Jonas blog; Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5!

EIT Health/ACM SIGCHI eHealth Summer School 2017, week 1 in Dublin

The EIT Health/SIGCHI eHealth summer school was last week in Dublin. A summer school is a great opportunity for PhD students and other researchers to learn more about a subject and to get connected to other people with a similar interest. This summer school was about HCI and eHealth, and therefore a whole bunch from us participated, more exactly Christiane, Diane, Jonas, Åsa and me! (or Åsa is one of the organizers). The summer school will continue with one more week in the end of August, and that time in Stockholm and Uppsala!

The Dublin week of the summer school was very well organized by Gavin Doherty from Trinity College Dublin. The participants were a good mix between innovators and eHealth researchers from different related disciplines such as HCI, Technology, Health Sciences and Psychology, and also patients participated! We got to hear many good talks during the week, and had hands on exercises and group work. The talks covered for example patient and public involvement, user centered design, how to use fiction in the design process, designing for behavior change, inclusive design, internet interventions, ethics in eHealth, and some very interesting case studies! Geraldine Fitzpatrick from TU Wien gave a lecture called “Putting eHealth in context” and mentioned that instead of designing “smart” systems, we should focus on systems that enable people to make their own decisions.

During a inspiring lecture by Madeline Balaam (OpenLab, University of Newcastle) about design ideation we got to do a short workshop to generate design solutions for eHealth related to different technologies, contexts, users, and health conditions.

The picture is from Madeline Balaam’s lecture about user centred design, and the development of the app FeedFinder, which is an app for finding good breastfeeding locations!

Ann Blandford from University College London gave a lecture about medical device safety. One of the important things she said was to design for resilience by “empowering people to be creative within the bounds of understood safety practices”.

You can read more about the summer school in Jonas’ blog (day 1, 2, 3, 4, 5), in Åsa’s blog, and in Diane’s blog (here, and here)! The week in Dublin was great and now I am really looking forward to the second week of the summer school in Stockholm and Uppsala!

MedTech Science & Innovation

Wednesday last week, and as a beginning of the Swedish MedTech week 2017, was the inauguration of MedTech Science & Innovation which is a new medical research and innovation centre in Uppsala. The centre is a long term collaboration between the Uppsala University Hospital and Uppsala University.

The day started with a welcome from Fredrik Nikolajeff and Marika Edoff from MedTech Science & Innovation. It was a busy schedule with many good presentations. Magnus Larsson, the head of the Digital Development Unit at the Uppsala University Hospital, talked about the digitalization within healthcare. Anna Attefall from Innovation Akademiska talked about how they support innovations, and she stressed the importance of user tests!

Further the program included many short presentations from researchers working with a broad range of MedTech applications. One example is Robin Strand from CBA and the division of Visual Information and Interaction at the IT department at Uppsala University (same division as the HTO group) who presented their work with advanced image analysis as a support for surgery. I was last out among the research presentations and talked about how important it is that the MedTech systems are usable, and how we work with including the user perspective.

The event ended with industry presentations, with for example Carl Bennet from the Getinge Group who stressed the importance to measure other values than costs to stimulate new innovations for better healthcare.

Listen to the presentations (in Swedish) here

DISA Kick-off

We had an exciting two day Kick-off meeting with the DISA-project in beautiful Sigtuna on Thursday and Friday last week. The first day the project team focused on getting to know each other, and to talk about what is done so far and future plans. Minna Salminen-Karlsson gave us insight of what a gender perspective of the project can be and we had a discussion about the PhD students work and how our interests fit into the project. After long and giving discussions we manage to get out just before sunset for our own organized city tour. We visited the historical sites of Sigtuna and took turns conveying its interesting history.

The DISA project has a reference group who was invited for the second day of the kick-off. This day started off with a speed-mingle, which is a form of team building exercise including questions like “how do you explain what you are working with to your friends and family?”. It was a great and fun way to get to know each other.

The day continued with a presentation about the overall goals and objectives of the DISA project by Åsa Cajander. Christiane Grünloh, Diane Golay and I also presented the three project tracks, Oncology, Surgical care, and Children’s care. The last hours of the day was spent on a workshop where we, together with the reference group, brainstormed about the effects of digitalization on the work environment of nurses. The workshop lead to interesting discussions, and it was a good opportunity to learn from the reference groups experiences from health care and from previous research.

The Kick-off was very well organized by Gerolf Nauwerck and it seemed like all participants were satisfied after the intense days! I had a great time and feel excited to work with the DISA-project and of course together with this group. I especially enjoyed the openness of the discussions and how everyone contributed with their own perspective and expertise.