Ambient haptics in clinical environments

Clinical environments are high cognitive load environment that are fraught with errors. Introduction of technological artefacts can often disrupt clinical workflow causing unnecessary interruptions and increasing risk for errors. There is hence a need for systems that have high usability and behave in a veridical manner. This requirement renders ambient monitoring and evaluation as attractive solutions for clinical environments. Ambient systems employ devices that are seamlessly integrated in a userpsilas environment, providing unobtrusive and interactive access to digital media. These devices, when networked in systems of sensors, actuators, and computational units, can support intelligent, adaptive machine behavior. Haptics as a modality has an important and indispensable role to play in the evolution of user-centered ambient interfaces. The haptic modality is largely untapped, while the vision and auditory modalities are often saturated. The advent of sophisticated haptic interfaces and tangible interfaces makes it possible to employ haptics in ubiquitous and veridical interactions between people and technology, providing supplementary and/or complementary information from a separate information channel. This talk will present challenges and opportunities of employing ambient haptic systems in clinical environments. The talk will lay down a broad theoretical framework to employ such systems successfully in clinical environments while avoiding pitfalls. The proposed theoretical framework is aimed to provide design, development and evaluation guidelines for ambient haptic systems in clinical environment. The application of the framework will be presented through examples of ambient haptic systems for clinicians, patients and hospital administrators.