OR specific domain model for usability evaluations of intra-operative systems

Studying the usability of a system has become increasingly popular over the last decades and is seen as a crucial factor for the success of many systems and products. In a complex domain, like the Operating Room, creating systems with high usability is even more important, as deficiencies in the design can have serious impacts. However, evaluating the usability of systems in complex domains like the Operating Room (OR) is not an easy endeavor. In order to handle the complexity of the OR domain, usability specialists require deep domain knowledge, which they usually cannot acquire. To support the usability study of intra-operative systems, we propose an OR specific domain model and inspect how this model could be used to reduce some of the usability evaluation problems. The proposed model consists of various aspects of the Operating Room, which affect the domain complexity like workflow, human role and their interconnections. As a proof of concept, we report from a usability study of an intra-operative device, which was performed based on the proposed approach.