Informing caregivers by providing them with contextual medical information can significantly improve the quality of patient care activities. However, information flow in hospitals is still tied to traditional manual or digitised lengthy patient record files that are often not accessible while caregivers are attending to patients. Leveraging the proliferation of pervasive awareness technologies (sensors, actuators and mobile displays), recent studies have explored this information presentation aspect borrowing theories from context-aware computing, i.e., presenting subtle information contextually to support the activity at hand. However, the understanding of the information space (i.e., what information should be presented) is still fairly abstruse, which inhibits the deployment of such real-time activity support systems. To this end, this paper first presents situated glyphs, a graphical entity to encode situation specific information, and then presents our findings from an in-situ qualitative study addressing the information space tailored to such glyphs. Applying technology probes using situated glyphs and different glyph display form factors, the study aimed at uncovering the information space pertained to both primary and secondary medical care. Our analysis has resulted in a large set of information types as well as given us deeper insight on the principles for designing future situated glyphs. We report our findings in this paper that we expect would provide a solid foundation for designing future assistive systems to support patient care activities.

This note offers a reflection on the design space for a situated glyph - a single, adaptive and multivariate graphical unit that provides in-situ task information in demanding work environments. Rather than presenting a concrete solution, our objective is to map out the broad design space to foster further exploration. The analysis of this design space in the context of dynamic work environments covers i) information affinity - the type of information can be presented with situated glyphs, ii) representation density - the medium and fidelity of information presentation, iii) spatial distribution - distribution granularity and placement alternatives for situated glyphs, and finally iv) temporal distribution - the timing of information provision through glyphs. Our analysis has uncovered new problem spaces that are still unexplored and could motivate further work in the field.