Supporting communication in rehabilitation engineering teams

The objectives of this project were to examine how members of a colocated rehabilitation engineering team communicate during their work and hence deduce the implications of these communications for the design of video-based technologies to support communication among members of a virtual rehabilitation engineering team. Twenty-four assessment clinic sessions conducted by rehabilitation engineering team were recorded on videotape over a period of 3 years. These tapes were analyzed in considerable detail using a schema to identify and classify the talk and actions of the team members. Combining talk and actions with artifacts is a mechanism used by designers to develop ideas and communicate them to others. Speakers rely on actions to support and make their talk lucid. Cooperation based on sharing artifacts is a strength of face-to-face interaction. Participants can experience artifacts and observe others using the artifacts. Tools such as videoconferencing to support virtual rehabilitation teams will have to provide the participants with the ability to see often quite subtle gestures and actions if they are to grasp the meaning of the talk. Increased understanding how a team communicates visually complex data may (1) aid development of next generation videoconferencing equipment to better support distributed designers and rehabilitation engineers and (2) guide development of techniques to enhance the quality of visual data presentation in current videoconferencing systems.