Activetheatre - A collaborative, event-based capture and access system for the operating theatre

Abstract

Building capture and access (C&A) applications for use in the operation theatre differs greatly from C&A applications built to support other settings e.g. meeting rooms or classrooms. Based on field studies of surgical operations, this paper explores how to design C&A applications for the operation theatre. Based on the findings from our field work, we have built the ActiveTheatre, a C&A prototype. ActiveTheatre is built to support collaboration in and around the operating theatre, to capture events instead of automatically capturing everything, and to be integrated with existing applications already present in the operation theatre. The ActiveTheatre prototype has been developed in close cooperation with surgeons and nurses at a local hospital. The work on the prototype and our initial evaluations have provided an insight into how to design, capture and access applications that are going to be used in other settings than the meeting room. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.