Human Factors and Technology Research
Mission
The number of preventable deaths during hospital care is staggering. One estimate put deaths caused by medical errors at nearly 100,000 per year, more than deaths of breast cancer, HIV, and motor vehicle crashes all combined. The mission of Human Factors and Technology Research is to conduct research in human factors and information technologies to improve safety and health care operations. We strive for excellence in three research areas: patient safety, care coordination, and real-time clinical informatics. It is a multi-disciplinary program that integrates human factors, technology, and medicine.
Focus of Study
Our research efforts are to develop and employ human factors methodologies and real-time clinical informatics tools in several clinical areas. These clinical areas include: pre-hospital care, emergency department, trauma, intensive care, and perioperative processes.
Research Topics
- Pre-hospital physiological data acquisition
- In-hospital high-bandwidth physiology data acquisition
- Algorithms for processing of physiological data
- Active risk assessment in emergency departments
- Team performance in trauma and critical care
- Web-based training to improve patient safety
- Communication in intensive care
- Compliance to evidence-based practices
- Display technology to support surgical flows
- Display to improve decision cycles in collaborative care
Resources
The Human Factors and Technology Research Program is located in the R Adam Cowley Shock Trauma Center, amidst of the highly dynamic trauma clinical environments. We have Electronics Lab, System Development Lab and Video Lab (total 850 sqft). The laboratories are used for hardware and software development, video data analysis, and system integration. We currently maintain six servers on-site for serving documents, archived video-files, live streaming media, and live GPS tracking data and wireless data transfer used in research projects. In addition, we maintain a number of computer programming development workstations and computer-hardware prototype environments for specific project development.
The Division has extraordinary research access to clinical settings, including:
- Telecontrol Room
- Audio Video Data Acquisition at the Shock Trauma Center
- VideoBoard system for the 6-OR surgical unit of the Shock Trauma Center
- VideoBoard system for the 19-OR general unit of the University of Maryland Medical Center
Faculty researchers:
Contact Us
Office tel: (410) 328-7265
Office fax: (410) 328-7230