Studies concerning critical incidents with technical equipment in the medical/clinical context have found out, that in most of the cases non-ergonomic and non-reliable user interfaces provoke use deficiencies and therefore hazards for the patient and the attending physician. Based on these studies, the authors assume that adequate and powerful tools for the systematic design of error-tolerant and ergonomic Human-Machine-Interfaces for medical devices are missing. In this context, the Chair of Medical Engineering (mediTEC) has developed the new software-based tool mAIXuse in order to overcome these difficulties and to support designers as well as risk assessors. Based on two classical formal-analytical approaches, mAIXuse provides a high-performance modelling structure with integrated temporal relations in order to visualise and analyse the detailed use process, even with complex user interfaces. The approach can be used from the very early developmental stages up to the final validation process. Results of a comparative study with the new mAIXuse tool and a conventional process-FMEA (Failure Mode and Effect Analysis) show, that the new approach clearly outperforms the FMEA technique.
The APIC approach to high performance network interface design: protected DMA and other techniques