User Interface Analysis of Pump Infusion Medical Device

For any type of medical devices, safety, accuracy, and efficiency are always top priorities. The interface design is about helping medical professionals save time and prevent errors.

There are basically two types of infusion pumps in the medical field, stand-alone and smart infusion pump. For stand-alone type, the errors are usually caused by wrongly rendering results and inappropriate designed interfaces. “Web of things” technology connects the infusion devices and makes them smarter and also adds the complexity to the interface design. The errors for the smart infusion devices are also from lack of communication between members in the community and from inappropriate decision support system.

iVenix pump interfaces from www.iVenix.com

1. Stand-alone Infusion Pump

  • Errors on Output Interface
    These lead to inaccurate and incorrect feedback to users. Keeping information hierarchy clear and accurate is very important.
  • Buttons incorrectly or unclearly labeled
  • Complicated menus with irregular branching
    In Nunnally and colleagues (2002)

Measuring User Experience for In-Vehicle-Infotainment (IVI) System

Today, personal navigation devices such GPS or mobile apps in car are very popular already. This seems not enough; other new functions continue to be added into the IVI system such as vehicle diagnostics, phone calls, rear-view cameras, climate control, multimedia audio and video, internet and cloud connectivity, etc. Can people handle so much information on a small touch screen when they are driving?
http-bizbeatblog.dallasnews.com-files-2013-07-hud

Making Usability Evaluation Reliable

It is true that usability practitioners are still facing many challenges everyday. Many studies found that different teams tested same tasks, but the difference in finding between teams was significant. On Rolf Molich and Joseph Dumas (2006)’s study, the average percentage overlap was only 11.5%. The limited overlap could be interpreted as a sign of poor evaluation, or you can think that the usability space is so huge that it is inevitably leads to limited overlap.

For the people who are new to this field, it seems the usability evaluations are not reliable at all. While, I think with carefully preparing and planning, the improvement could be significant. I believe there are three major aspects that need to be considered:
diagram

1. Improving Evaluators and Moderators’ Effect
The quality of the evaluators or moderators would have major impact on the evaluation result. Improving heuristics expert review and providing suitable heuristics list could let practitioners