Electronic Medical Records: Provotype visualisation maximises clinical usability

The Electronic Medical Record (EMR) is the essential tool of the clinical consultation, effectively replacing the paper medical record. Since its gradual adoption in the early 2000s there has been a failure to achieve even moderate levels of EMR usability in clinical settings, resulting in a negative impact on clinical care, time efficiency and patient safety. This research explores how deeper collaboration with clinical users through participatory design, drawing on the disciplines of visual design, user experience (UX) design and visual analytics, might offer a more effective approach to this important problem. The lead researcher for this project is both a practising doctor and design researcher. Usability of two commercial EMR interfaces in the field of sexual health is explored through a mixed method survey, with responses used to inform the design of an interface provotype. This in turn is evaluated through repeat survey and ‘test-drive’ talk-aloud workshops. Results from the survey on two commercial EMR interfaces (n=49) revealed deep dissatisfaction particularly around issues of navigation, flow of consultation, frustration, safety, time-dependent and time-independent data, data complexity and data salience. Comparative provotype evaluation (n=63) showed that clinically-relevant visualisation offers marked gains in clinical usability and performance. This research argues for a re-imagining of the way we look at medical data during the clinical consultation so that the affordances and benefits of the digital format can be exploited more fully. It highlights the value of combining participatory design with visualisation to embed explicit, experiential and even tacit clinical knowledge into the EMR interface

Multiscale modeling of tempering of AISI H13 hot-work tool steel – Part 2: Coupling predicted mechanical properties with FEM simulations

Simulation of austenitization and quenching of steel using the Finite Element Method (FEM) is nowadays a common tool to predict residual stresses and deformations during these processes. However the simulation of tempering, which determines the final residual stresses and distortions has been often neglected or performed in a purely phenomenological and highly simplified way. The objective of this study is to precisely predict the relaxation of internal stresses during tempering, taking explicitly into account the evolution of the microstructure. Mechanical properties which determine the relaxation of stress; namely the drop of the yield stress and the creep mechanism are the key factors for the success of the simulation. These mechanical parameters can be determined experimentally for a specific tempering temperature. However tempering temperature for most steels varies for each industrial application in order to adjust the desired hardness-toughness relation. Consequently, experimentally measurement of decisive mechanical properties which determine the amount of stress relaxation for each tempering temperature is very costly. Therefore, these material parameters were simulated from physically based material models with coupled microstructural simulations in the first part of this two-part investigation. In this part of the study, the simulated mechanical properties will be coupled with the FEM simulations using "Abaqus (R)", in order to simulate the stress relaxation during the tempering process of a thick-walled workpiece made of hot-work tool steel AISI H13 (DIN 1.2344, X40CrMoV5-1). Utilizing this methodology, different tempering conditions (soaking time, tempering temperature) can be considered in the model to predict the stress relaxation in macroscopic scale. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved