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Principal Investigators at Carnegie Mellon University: Sara Kiesler, Susan Fussell, and Jie Yang; Principal Investigators at University of Maryland: Yan Xaio, Jacob Seagull and Colin F. Mackenzie, University of Maryland Human Factors Research Program; Principal Investigator at University of Arizona: Suzanne Weisband. NSF Award # ITR: 0325047 Many vital organizations operating in critical environments—hospitals, security agencies, airlines, and others—have evolved into team-based, quasi-decentralized structures. Safety, efficiency, and quality performance in these organizations depend not only on the professionalism of each team, but also on the ability of the organization to support large scale collaboration—coordination across teams, tasks, and resources. This coordination occurs continuously, at all levels of the organization. In an environment of unpredictable events, resource constraints, time pressure, and high workload, teams must be reconfigured, resources reassigned, and tasks negotiated and changed over time and place. Coordination problems in large scale collaboration are common in critical environments, and are a significant cause of errors, miscommunication, and even loss of life. This research begins to tackle problems of coordination in large-scale collaboration. The research begins with field research in one type of vital organization, the hospital. It includes research to understand the issues, and technology development to alleviate the problems. We also will carry out laboratory research on basic questions, and extend the field research to at least one other critical domain. Field Work. This work, in collaboration with colleagues at U. of Maryland, has just begun. Master’s student Marina Kobayashi recently completed a week of observation and interviews at the University of Maryland’s Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore. Her work focuses on the types of problems that arise in trajectory management, particularly OR scheduling. She is using a combination of modeling techniques in order to better understand the nature of trajectory management problems and the types of workarounds people devise when conflicts arise. Yuqing Ren recently led an ethnographic study of Operating Room coordination practices in a Mid-Atlantic hospital. The goal is to understand challenges associated with multiple group collaboration and how information technology can be improved to facilitate cross-boundary communication and coordination in critical environments. Ren, Y., Kiesler, S., Fussell, S., & Scupelli, P. (2007). Trajectories in multiple group coordination: A field study of hospital operating suites. In Proceedings of the 40th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. (abstract) (download PDF) Laboratory Studies Suzanne Weisband and colleagues at University of Arizona are developing an online computer simulation to help us model and study trajectories over time in complex medical collaborations. Computer Modelling. Transactive memory or knowing what others know plays an important role in large scale collaboration in which people with diverse backgrounds and experiences need to work efficiently and effectively with one another. Yuqing Ren recently published a paper that examines the contingent effects of transactive memory in various organizational settings, particularly groups involving a large number of participants and functioning in volatile environments. Ren, Y., Carley, K. M., & Argote, L. (2006). The contingency effects of transactive memory: When is it more beneficial to know what others know? Management Science, 52(5), 671-682. (abstract) (download PDF) Technology Development. Previous field work at the UMD site found that a large whiteboard located centrally in the trauma center operating room suites played a critical role in the moment by moment coordination of doctor, nurse, and patient trajectories. However, this whiteboard had value solely for personnel present in the trauma room suite. One of our first goals for technology development was to create a hybrid whiteboard that would allow for both local and remote posting and retrieval of information. In conjunction with NSF grant #0208903 (Gestural Communication), doctoral student Jiazhi Ou and project PI Jie Yang, have recently completed version one of DOVEBoard, a hybrid whiteboard that is accessible to both local and remote personnel (see Figure). In the next few weeks, we will be beginning our first user study of the value of the whiteboard in a simulated medical collaboration paradigm. The DOVE (Drawing Over Video Environment) system we implemented combines information from remote and local collaborators and shows it on a physical whiteboard, which can be viewed by all users. A scenario of DOVEBoard system is shown in Figure 1. Here, projected texts, strokes from remote users and physical texts, post-it’s from local users are shown on a shared whiteboard. The scene of the board is captured lively by a network IP camera and shown on remote collaborators’ computing devices (lower left).
Figure 1. An example of DOVEBoard. |
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