Applications of ecological interface design in supporting the nursing process.

Today's nursing environment is complex, with many sources of data that are often poorly displayed. Ecological interface design (EID) is a systematic approach to designing interfaces to complex systems. EID has been used to design interfaces for aviation displays, power plant monitoring and control, human hemodynamic monitoring, anesthesia monitoring, and neonatal intensive care monitoring and diagnosis. EID makes critical relationships easily visible, eliminating the mental workload of integrating, calculating, or remembering multiple values. This paper reviews past experimental studies of EID in healthcare applications and discusses the application of EID to a decision-support tool for diabetic patients using personal digital assistants. The authors also discuss other contributions that EID could make to the nursing process in the areas of physiological monitoring, decision support, database design, and the measurement and analysis of nurse-sensitive outcomes, including patient safety outcomes.