Chapters authored
HAPTIC: Haptic Anatomical Positioning to Improve Clinical Monitoring
Hospitals are inundated by the sounds of patient monitoring devices and alarms. These are meant to help, yet also create a stressful environment for physicians and patients. To address this issue, we consider the possibility of delivering complementary haptic alarm stimuli via a wearable tactile display. This may reduce the necessity for the plethora of audible alarms in the Intensive Care Unit and Operating Room, potentially decreasing fatigue among clinicians, and improving sleep quality for patients. The study described here sought to determine a suitable anatomical location where such a tactile display could be worn. Although the wrist is an obvious default, based on the success of smartwatches and fitness monitors, wearable devices below the elbow are disallowed in aseptic procedural environments. We hypothesized that haptic perception would be approximately equivalent at the wrist and ankle, and confirmed this experimentally. Thus, for a healthcare setting, we suggest that the ankle is a suitable alternative for the placement of a tactile display.
Part of the book: Proceedings of the Conference on Design and Semantics of Form and Movement