Gaze-based awareness in complex healthcare environments

Medical staff work in collaborative environments and require information regarding workmates, patients and resources as well as data related to the completion of ongoing tasks. Healthcare systems provide a large quantity of information and current applications usually involve the simultaneous use of many different devices. A system might monitor several patients, provide alerts and warnings as well as information on pending tasks, and many other demanding workloads. It is therefore an open question whether a professional is able to attend a rehabilitation process involving technology and still be able to remain aware of all notifications provided by different devices. In this paper, gaze-based awareness is presented as a natural evolution, through current technology, of the common awareness concept. The key concept consists of considering users’ gaze as fundamental to personalizing the way to subtle notify users about changes on unattended screens. To this end, different levels of subtlety of notification are considered based on where the user is looking together and the user’s work conditions. We present a realization of gaze-based awareness using a real healthcare system named Ubi4health in which this awareness has been considered an essential element during development.