Usability Model for Medical User Interface of Ventilator System in Intensive Care Unit

A usability model is a hierarchical structure encompassing the key elements such as users, user interface and interaction between them. It is a generic template which is independent of usability evaluation methods and provides flexibility for adaptation in different contexts and domains. In this paper, a usability model for medical user interfaces, especially for ventilator systems in Intensive Care Unit (ICU), is proposed based on Norman’s action-oriented seven-step model to capture a related medical context. A ventilator system is a therapeutic device, which provides a respiratory support to critically-ill patients. Currently, a usability of user interfaces of ventilator systems is evaluated by typical usability evaluation methods from software industry. These evaluation methods miss out important elements in medical context. Therefore, a need for a specialized usability model for medical user interfaces is fulfilled with a proposed usability model encompassing vital elements such as medical user, user interface, ICU environment and time required. This usability model is validated first, through a human work analysis using videos of selected tasks with medical user interfaces and then, with an overview of critical factors affecting medical user interfaces in ICU. In future, a proposed usability model can be integrated with a suitable usability evaluation method for evaluating medical user interfaces to identify related medical usability problems more effectively.