Supporting situational awareness through a patient overview screen for bipolar disorder treatment

Situational awareness, and how systems can be designed to support it, has been a focus in many dynamic, safety critical contexts, with great success. The work presented here extends the study of situation awareness into the domain of patient overview screens in personal monitoring systems. In this paper we report on the design and formative evaluation of a detailed patient overview screen for supporting the treatment of bipolar disorder through MONARCA, a personal monitoring system. We define the key items for supporting situational awareness for clinicians, as well as discuss key findings such as doctors vs. nurses needs and the lack of need for situational awareness support.