Visual TASK: A Collaborative Cognitive Aid for Acute Care Resuscitation

TL;DR

This paper evaluates Visual TASK, a collaborative cognitive aid designed to improve situational awareness during acute care resuscitation, highlighting its potential benefits and limitations in high-stress medical environments.

Contribution

The study introduces Visual TASK, a novel collaborative cognitive aid co-designed with clinicians, and assesses its effectiveness and challenges in simulated resuscitation scenarios.

Findings

Kinect is unsuitable for high-stress resuscitation settings.

Fixation extends beyond reference guides to other objects in the environment.

Visual TASK has potential to improve team cognition in acute care.

Abstract

Preventable medical errors are a severe problem in healthcare, causing over 400,000 deaths per year in the US in hospitals alone. In acute care, the branch of medicine encompassing the emergency department (ED) and intensive care units (ICU), error rates may be higher to due low situational awareness among clinicians performing resuscitation on patients. To support cognition, novice team leaders may rely on reference guides to direct and anticipate future steps. However, guides often act as a fixation point, diverting the leader's attention away from the team. To address this issue, we conducted a qualitative study that evaluates a collaborative cognitive aid co-designed with clinicians called Visual TASK. Our study explored the use of Visual TASK in three simulations employing a projected shared display with two different interaction modalities: the Microsoft Kinect and a touchscreen. Our results suggest that tools like the Kinect, while useful in other areas of acute care like the OR, are unsuitable for use in high-stress situations like resuscitation. We also observed that fixation may not be constrained to reference guides alone, and may extend to other objects in the room. We present our findings, and a discussion regarding future avenues in which collaborative cognitive aids may help in improving situational awareness in resuscitation.