Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
and sharing of information across these multiple stakeholders and communi-
ties of interest. In other words, biosurveillance systems must support not only
i nd iv idua l SA but a l so tea m SA a nd sha red SA a mong t hese geog raph ica l ly d i s -
tributed entities. Unfortunately, limited research exists that investigates how
biosurveillance systems can be effectively used to support their users' SA. To
address this issue, we next describe a set of SA-oriented guidelines that specifi-
cally target the SA needs of health professionals working in biosurveillance.
4.3 SA-oriented Guidelines
Ideally, biosurveillance systems should be designed to automatically pro-
cess large amounts of information in order to rapidly provide public health
professionals with the SA they need for early detection and management of
potential outbreaks (Mnatsakanyan et al. 2007). Creating system designs that
enhance health professionals' awareness of what is happening in a particular
situation can dramatically improve their detection and decision-making per-
formance. Yet current biosurveillance systems are data driven in design such
that health professionals are “awash with competing bits of data” (Endsley,
Bolte, and Jones 2003), that is, systems often provide users with large amounts
of data irrespective of the task or goal they are trying to accomplish at that
moment. Instead, a well-designed system should simultaneously focus on
providing critical data that is structured to support the active goals of the end
user while at the same time promoting team and shared SA.
Traditional human factors design methods and principles are insufficient
for achieving these requirements in that these primarily address the physi-
cal and perceptual characteristics of system components, rather than the way
that the integrated system needs to function from a cognitive standpoint. To
address this issue, we propose that the design of biosurveillance systems needs
to be guided by the Situation Awareness-Oriented Design (SAOD) process.
Developed by Endsley and colleagues (see Endsley, Bolte, and Jones 2003) as
a means to improve human decision-making and performance through opti-
mizing SA, the SAOD process is user centered and derived from a detailed
analysis of the goals, decisions, and SA requirements of the operator. This
process has been successfully applied as a design philosophy for systems
involving remote maintenance operations, medical systems, flexible manu-
facturing cells, and military command and control. Two main components
of the SAOD process that are particularly relevant in biosurveillance are SA
Requirements Analysis and SA-Oriented Design Principles. In our previous
work, we have successfully applied these components of the SAOD process to
develop information systems that provide SA to public health professionals
working in the biosurveillance domain. We next describe these two compo-
nents in more detail and illustrate how they would be implemented.
