TADAA: towards automated detection of anaesthetic activity

Task analysis is a valuable research method for better understanding the activity of anaesthetists in the operating room (OR), providing evidence for designing and evaluating improvements to systems and processes. It may also assist in identifying potential error paths to adverse events, ultimately improving patient safety. Human observers are the current 'gold standard' for capturing task data, but they are expensive and have cognitive limitations. Our current research - Towards Automated Detection of Anaesthetic Activity (TADAA) - aims to produce an automated task analysis system, employing Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology to capture anaesthetists' location, orientation and stance (LOS), and machine learning techniques to translate that data into low-level and high-level activity labels. In this paper we present details of the system design and promising results from LOS sensing testing in laboratory and high fidelity OR simulator settings.