Participatory user centered design techniques for a large scale ad-hoc health information system

Abstract

During mass casualty incidents, an enormous amount of data, including the vital signs of the patients, the location of the patients, and the location of the first responders must be gathered and communicated efficiently. The Advanced Health and Disaster Aid Network (AID-N) used participatory design methods to develop an electronic triage system that changed how emergency personnel interacted, collected, and processed data at mass casualty incidents. Through a collaboration between computer scientists, biomedical engineers, usability analysts, paramedics, and medical doctors, AID-N constructed scalable algorithms to monitor a large numbers of patients, an intuitive interface to support overwhelmed responders, and an ad-hoc mesh network that maintained connectivity to patients in ad-hoc, chaotic settings. This paper describes an iterative approach to user-centered design that allows for the collection of a massive amount of data and presents this data in a clear and understandable format to the user.