A Wearable, Conductive Textile Based User Interface for Hospital Ward Rounds Document Access

This work is motivated by a hospital ward rounds scenario in the EU sponsored WearIT@Work Project. Based on a detailed application design and evaluation described in our previous work we have implemented a simple, wearable user interface seamlessly integrated in the doctor’s coat. The interface is based on a multi-electrodes, conductive textile capacitive sensor that allows the doctor to control the system with simple gestures without the need to touch non sterile material. This paper focuses on the software that robustly extracts the gestures from noisy sensor signals and an extensive real life evaluation, including a two weeks’ deployment of the interface in a hospital where it was used during real life rounds by three doctors, user questionnaires from a demonstration to a broader audience of hospital staff, and a systematic quantitative evaluation with students.