Lessons Learned from Customizing and Applying ACTA to Design a Novel Device for Emergency Medical Care

TL;DR

This paper details the application of a customized ACTA method over a year to design a novel combined medical device aimed at reducing the mental and physical load on emergency medical teams during preclinical patient care.

Contribution

It introduces a fully digital, customized ACTA process for user interface design in medical device development, including detailed requirements elicitation and iterative design workshops.

Findings

Successful application of a year-long customized ACTA process

Development of detailed user interface sketches and mockups

Lessons learned across four stages of the process

Abstract

Preclinical patient care is both mentally and physically challenging and exhausting for emergency teams. The teams intensively use medical technology to help the patient on site. However, they must carry and handle multiple heavy medical devices such as a monitor for the patient's vital signs, a ventilator to support an unconscious patient, and a resuscitation device. In an industry project, we aim at developing a combined device that lowers the emergency teams' mental and physical load caused by multiple screens, devices, and their high weight. The focus of this paper is to describe our ideation and requirements elicitation process regarding the user interface design of the combined device. For one year, we applied a fully digital customized version of the Applied Cognitive Task Analysis (ACTA) method to systematically elicit the requirements. Domain and requirements engineering experts created a detailed hierarchical task diagram of an extensive emergency scenario, conducted eleven interviews with subject matter experts (SMEs), and executed two design workshops, which led to 34 sketches and three mockups of the combined device's user interface. Cross-functional teams accompanied the entire process and brought together expertise in preclinical patient care, requirements engineering, and medical product development. We report on the lessons learned for each of the four consecutive stages of our customized ACTA process.