SuperNurse: nurses' workarounds informing the design of interactive technologies for home wound care

The increasing aging population needing homecare is leading to additional clinical work for homecare nurses. Wound care and documentation are substantial components of this work required to monitor patients and make appropriate clinical decisions. However, due to barriers in the systems that nurses are expected to use, and context of their activities, they create and use workarounds to get their job done. In this study, the most common themes of workarounds were identified and used to inform design iterations of a wound documentation application: SuperNurse. The exploratory and experimental design iterations involved homecare nurses, who expressed: curiosity, leading to further reflection; frustration, leading to identifying problems; and surprise, leading to identifying useful and easy to use designs. We found that nurse-centred design, informed by workarounds, led to using mobile, wearable, and speech recognition technology and improving ease of use and usefulness in SuperNurse.