Design of a Wearable Stress Monitoring Tool for Intensive Care Unit Nursing: Functional Information Requirements Analysis

Nurses are the last line of defense to reduce preventable medical errors; however, they suffer from poor systems design and human factors issues (e.g., long shifts, dynamic workload, stressful situations, and fatigue), contributing to a reduced quality of care. A smart nursing system based on physiological monitoring is being designed to help nurses and their managers to efficiently communicate, reduce interruptions that affect critical task performance, and monitor acute stress and fatigue levels. This paper documents the systematic process of deriving information requirements through a group-participatory usability study, conducted with nurses working in various Southeastern Texas hospitals. Information requirements derived from these studies include: a need for accessing patients’ vital signs as well as laboratory results, memory aid tools for various critical nursing tasks, and options to call for help and to reduce interruptions for critical tasks. The system shows promise to meet these requirements.

Application of Cognitive Map in Knowledge Management

to capture perceived relationships of attributes related to ill-structured decision problems that decision makers have to face. This article provides an overview of the application of cognitive maps (CMs) in the design and development of intelligent information systems. Here, CM is used as a set of techniques to identify subjective beliefs and to portray those beliefs externally as follows: • Causal mapping is used to investigate the cognition of decision-makers. A causal map represents a set of causal relationships (i.e., cause and effect relationships) among constructs within a system. For example, Figure 1 shows that better sanitation facilities, causing an initial improvement in health, led to an increase in the city’s population. This growth led to more garbage, more bacteria, and therefore more disease. Causal map aids: 1) in identification of irrelevant data, 2) to evaluate the factors that affect a given class of decisions, and 3) enhances the overall understanding of a decision maker’s environment, particularly when it is ill-structured. • Semantic mapping, also known as idea mapping, is used to explore an idea without the constraints of a superimposed structure. A semantic map visually organizes related concepts around a main concept with tree-like branches. Figure 2 depicts different types of transportation, organized in three categories: land, water, and air. This technique facilitates communication between end-users and system analysts in support of information requirements analysis. • Concept mapping is a useful tool for organizing and representing concepts (events or objects) and their interrelationships in a particular domain. Each concept is designated with a label. The relationship between two concepts in a concept map is referred to as a proposition; propositions connect concepts to form a meaningful statement. Relationships between concepts are associative. For example, in Figure 3, two concepts of “plants” and “flowers” are associated via “may have” that form the proposition of “plants may have flowers.” Describing complex structures with simple propositions improve quality of conceptual modeling in the development of information systems.

An Approach to Information Requirements Analysis for Holonic Manufacturing Systems Development

This paper presets a methodology for representing a manufacturing System in order to help with the requirements analysis (RA) in Holonic Manufacturing Systems (HMS) development. The proposed methodology can reduce the cost and time involved at this stage by producing precise and accurate plans, specification requirements, and a design for HMS information systems. The dynamic activities, working mechanism of each holon, and relationships among holons are modeled using the Agent Unified Modeling Language (AUML) with Multi Agent Systems (MAS) approach. An experimental case study has been carried out in a firm in the die casting industry in order to demonstrate the features and the potential industrial application of presented methodology.