OBJECTIVE To understand the complex effects of interruption in healthcare. MATERIALS AND METHODS As interruptions have been well studied in other domains, the authors undertook a systematic review of experimental studies in psychology and human-computer interaction to identify the task types and variables influencing interruption effects. RESULTS 63 studies were identified from 812 articles...

Background noise and interruption were examined for their effects on learning health information. The final sample consisted of 48 college students randomly assigned to one of four conditions in a pretest-posttest, double-blind, 2 x 2 experiment comparing noise (noise/no noise) by interruption (interruption/no interruption). Students viewed one of four videotapes about safe antibiotic use and t...

OBJECTIVE To determine if infrared thermography is capable of precisely detecting loss of tissue perfusion in the spleen during a partial splenectomy. METHODS Five Landrace pigs, weighing between 12 and 15 kg, after intramuscular pre-anesthetic medication and intravascular infusion anesthesia, were submitted to four sequential vascular interruption steps of the arterial vessels to the lower s...

An important part of making a wearable computer unobtrusive is the user interface and the way it interrupts the user. The amount of interruption that have to be made on the users primary task should be minimized. Usage without interruption is of course best for the performance of the primary task but is often not possible as many tasks that the wearable computer is involved in do need interacti...

A decade ago, attention management was considered by some "the least explored frontier in cognitive science and human-machine cooperation" (Woods et al., 1994). Today, at least one aspect of attention management – interruption handling – still poses a major challenge for the design of human-machine systems and computer-supported collaborative work. Successful interruption management requires th...