Integrated patient monitoring system

• Main Author: Choo, Kok Boon.
• Other Authors: School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/53979
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Over the past few decades, medical equipment had became more advance with more sophisticated monitoring system that employed some graphical elements to improve the performance of the nurses in ICU. Four display interface was created for this study to investigate the effect of different display on the performance of the nurses in ICU. The four displays were: Numeric Display, Polygon with Line Trend, Parallel Coordinate with Line Trend and finally Parallel Coordinate with Dot Trend. Performance in this study refer to how fast were the decision making and how accurate the decision made compared to a benchmark set by four professional doctor. The Numeric Display was set as a control to simulate the current monitoring system employed in most ICU and it had the best overall performance but it was expected since most nurses in ICU were already very used to such display thus graphical displays were alien to them. However, when the data collected was further broken down and analyzed, graphical displays show interesting trends. Graphical display shows an improving performance after repeated usage while numeric display shows degrading performance thus suggesting reduced fatigue in graphical display. Graphical Display also shows the most consistent performance through the whole age range of 21 years old to 52 years old. Finally, Graphical Display also shows a better performance when monitoring patients with borderline vital signs. Overall, The Polygon Display performed the best among the other graphical display and Dot Trend performed better than the Line Trend. This study suggest that graphical display is indeed better than traditional numeric display currently used but effort had to be put in to educate the nurses in using it in order to bring out their highest performance. A new design was also created based on the data and comments collected from this study.