Unexpected incidents are common in intensive care medicine. One of the means to detect, diagnose and treat these events is physiological displays, which show the vital signs of a patient. Current monitors in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) provide numerical and waveform data. The present project focused on determining the problems and needs of ICU nurses for patient monitoring and on developing a display that addresses some of the problems. Semi-structured interviews with 26 ICU nurses identified usability problems of current patient monitors. Most nurses mentioned that current monitors make it difficult to access trends of vital signs and do not allow marking of events or interventions on the trend display. The results of the interviews resulted in a redesign of the patient display that is currently being evaluated. The results of the evaluation study will also be presented.
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