Original title: Code Black: Desktop-Mediated Co-Design of AR-HMD Microinteractions for Emergency Department Teamwork
Jonathan Segal, Jalynn Nicoly, Francisco Ortega, Angelique Taylor · September 2026
Emergency room teams handle chaotic, fast-moving situations where roles shift and quick choices about medicine matter. Augmented reality headsets, or AR-HMDs, can project helpful digital details directly into a person's field of view. To explore how these tools could aid team collaboration, researchers set up a 3D computer simulation on a desktop. Twelve healthcare workers used this interactive system to design and tweak virtual displays for timers, role alerts, and drug dose checks. Later, five original participants and 26 new healthcare workers reviewed the resulting visual ideas. The workers showed how virtual cues should appear, update, and disappear safely during clinical tasks. They also highlighted serious design challenges, including visual clutter, privacy, communication issues, reliability, and the need to keep everyone on the team informed.
Imagine you are cooking a meal with friends, and everyone needs to know which pot to stir or when to add spices. If instructions are shouted randomly, it is easy to miss a step or repeat work. In this paper, emergency room teams face similar coordination challenges, so researchers had them sketch how augmented reality glasses could show quiet, context-specific alerts about roles and tasks without adding visual clutter.
Emergency department teams coordinate under time pressure, and better spatial information displays could reduce errors. This work involves clinicians early in design to make future tools actually useful in real shifts.
The abstract does not evaluate functional AR-HMD systems or team-based clinical performance. It only presents design insights from a speculative co-design process, not real-world implementation or testing.
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Code Black: Desktop-Mediated Co-Design of AR-HMD Microinteractions for Emergency Department Teamwork — Jonathan Segal, Jalynn Nicoly, Francisco Ortega et al.
Abstract licence: CC0
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.