Anesthesia personnel's visual attention regarding patient monitoring in simulated non-critical and critical situations, an eye-tracking study

Cognitive ergonomics design of patient monitoring may reduce human factor errors in high-stress environments. Eye-tracking is a suitable tool to gain insight into the distribution of visual attention of healthcare professionals with patient monitors, which may facilitate their further development. This prospective, exploratory, high-fidelity simulation study compared anesthesia personnel's visual attention (fixation count and dwell-time) to 15 areas of interest on the patient monitor during non-critical and critical anesthesia situations. Furthermore, we examined the extent to which participants' experience influenced visual attention and which vital signs displayed on the patient monitor received the most visual attention. We used mixed zero-inflated Poisson regression and mixed linear models to analyze the data. Analyzing 23 ten-minute scenarios, we found significantly more fixations to the areas of interest on the patient monitor during critical than non-critical situations (rate ratio of 1.45; 95% CI 1.33 to 1.59; p