Usability Evaluation of Intensive Care Mechanical Ventilators, a Scoping Review

This paper presents a scoping review of the literature aiming to analyze state-of-the-art studies focused on the usability evaluation of intensive care mechanical ventilators by identifying (i) their purposes and (ii) the characteristics of their experimental designs. A systematic electronic search was performed, and sixteen studies were included in the scoping review. One study proposed a checklist to support heuristic evaluations, six studies performed usability evaluations of prototypes, and nine studies compared the usability of several commercial intensive care mechanical ventilators. These studies concluded that despite similar technical performance, ventilators exhibit significant differences in terms of task’s execution times, error rates, workload, and perceived usability. The results also pointed out that the interface’s terminology is heterogeneous which might impact the practitioners’ performance when working with several distinct devices.