JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The Patient Monitor (PM) is one of the most commonly used medical devices in hospitals worldwide. PMs are used to monitor patients’ vital signs in a wide variety of patient care settings, especially in critical care settings, such as intensive care units. An interesting observation is that the design of PMs has not changed significantly over the last two decades, with the layout and structure of PMs more or less unchanged, with incremental design changes occurring rather than significant transformational design changes. The authors thought it timely to review the challenges and opportunities in the design of PMs for enhanced usability and human factors.

Objective:

The object of this review was, therefore, two-fold: (i) To review studies which evaluated the usability, human factors and user experience of existing commercial patient monitors, to determine what is the overall experience of clinicians with current patient monitor design. (ii) To review innovations in PM design proposed by researchers (over the review period) and to explore how clinicians responded to these design changes.

Methods:

A literature search of relevant databases, included data up to June 2019 with no cut-off on the start date, identified 21 related studies.

Results:

Although there is some evidence that clinicians are challenged to use some features in PM, overall the experience of clinicians with PMs is positive, with clinicians not expressing dissatisfaction with PMs. Nonetheless, research on design innovation was carried out with the objective of enhancing PM usability. A detailed description of these novel prototype PMs is provided, including a detailed analysis of the structure of the different user interfaces as a resource for developers. The analysis of the literature indicates that graphical and integrated displays have the potential of improving the user experience and performance of nurses and doctors. However, the outcomes of the experiments comparing novel and traditional PMs are still inconclusive and are dependent on the specific context of use.

Conclusions:

More studies investigating the user experience and usability of commercial PMs and novel interfaces for real-time vital sign monitoring are necessary to determine whether or not they could be applied successfully in critical care. To get a proper measure of clinician’s experience with PMs, testing needs to be carried out over an extended period of time. However, this can represent a significant challenge as the targeted participants are usually unavailable for long periods of testing.