PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

The reprocessing of medical devices is an essential procedure to keep hospitals operational. Workers at the Central Sterilization Supply Department (CSSD) clean, disinfect and sterilize medical devices and have to obligate to the manifold of legal and hygiene prescriptions. Failures during reprocessing can endanger patients' safety and increase costs. The process of decontamination has rich sources of failures because of the complexity of hygiene, medical devices and regulatory specifications. The benefits of an assistance system helping workers in preventing failures are therefore obvious and crucial. New interaction technologies such as augmented reality can potentially help workers in the CSSD to avoid failures during the reprocessing of medical devices. Challenging requirements for the application of new interaction technology within the CSSD arise through process complexity, legislation, integration and hygiene restrictions. This thesis proposes an assistance system that supports the worker in the unclean area of a CSSD with respect to these requirements. The system provides a user interface for context-aware worker guidance and collection of process relevant data from the worker. The proposed interaction mechanism of 'virtual touches' fulfills the hygiene requirements and is realized by an adapted workspace which is equipped with a depth camera and a projected user interface. The 'business process modeling notation 2.0 (BPMN 2.0)' standard is utilized to define process models that control the workflow, coordinate the system's components and maintain a database for quality assurance and worker guidance. In addition to an in depth description of the system, an evaluation with two user studies and interviews with CSSD domain experts are conducted throughout this thesis. The results reveal a high capability for failure avoidance during the reprocessing of medical devices without delaying the process compared to today's CSSDs. Additionally, CSSD experts appraise a high practical relevance and underline the feasibility of the underlying concepts for the CSSD domain. The concepts of the process integration, the standardized modeling of the workflow and workers' tasks as well as the context-aware interface are also helpful, relevant and applicable in the domain of manual assembly processes. Thus, this thesis describes, how the system can be transfered to the domain of manual production. The presentation of a prototype at a renowned international industrial fair and the accompanying feedback from manufacturing experts underline the scalability and the portability of the proposed assistance system to the production domain, which is a result of a component based system architecture utilizing process models for the coordination of computational devices and human workers.