Designing with Awareness: Building an Agenda for Worker and Patient Well-being

Awareness technologies are a core interest for CSCW: When people pay attention to each other's actions, it reduces the need for active communication required to accomplish the complex, cooperative work, for example, characteristic of hospitals. In Denmark, healthcare workers (HCWs) and patients face challenges with the architectural design of super hospitals. Change of workflows – most importantly, the shift to single-patient rooms in the new super hospitals - is restricted by the fact that HCWs' well-being is at risk when they have to attend to more rooms. Also, the risk of adverse events increases. The patient's well-being is at risk when they feel lonely or even forgotten in a single-patient room. In this paper, we propose an agenda for awareness technologies designed around both worker- and patient well-being. Our proposal is examined through prototyping an awareness technology, iAware. The solution draws together insights from a long-term ethnographic study (+5y) of how to design sensed environments responsibly [Anon]. Today's awareness technologies in hospitals are typically designed from HCWs' perspective. We identified 4 openings for supporting patients' and HCWs' mutual awareness of workflows: 1) progress of 'ward rounds', 2) patient 'visits', 3) patient 'calls', and 4) patient 'mobility.' We end with concluding remarks on how sensed environments can be designed with an agenda of being relevant to HCWs and patients' well-being.