International Computer Human Interaction (CHI) conference

In late April, Dr Jeremy Opie presented research at the International Computer Human Interaction (CHI) conference held in Hamburg as part of the Workgroup on Interactive Systems in Healthcare (WISH) symposium. This symposium connects academic and industry researchers across human-computer interaction, medical informatics, health informatics, digital health, and beyond to foster a community around innovations in consumer and medical health and wellbeing.

The research Jeremy presented was based on the ongoing study exploring the application and usability of the suture glove, with the paper entitled ‘The Future of Neonatal Skull Suture Detection’. One of the concerns that arise when developing novel healthcare technology is the ability to evaluate early prototypes with intended users within the context of their use. In relation to the suture glove, a glove developed to detect suture lines on a neonatal skull to assist clinicians to determine the position of the baby, it is neither safe nor ethical to test a prototype in the intended situation of use (i.e., vaginal examinations).

Therefore, to ensure that the study was ecologically valid but also provided the research team with the flexibility of the study, they conducted a pilot study with an intended user, not only to validate that the study design worked but also to identify areas of the study that could be improved to make the study seem as close to reality as possible. This led to modifying the setup from an open neonatal fetal head examination to something that better resembles a vagina to obscure the user’s view and to restrict their hand movements but open enough for the researchers to observe how people perform vaginal examinations and engage with using the suture glove.

Additionally, the symposium had rich discussions on the future direction of human factors research within clinical settings, and there were many other presentations that were insightful and will hopefully lead to future collaborations.