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Objective: To investigate whether head-worn displays (HWDs) help mobile participants make better alarm management decisions and achieve better situation awareness than alarms alone. Background: Patient alarms occur frequently in hospitals but often do not require clinical intervention. Clinicians may become desensitized to alarms and fail to respond to clinically relevant alarms. HWDs could make patient information continuously accessible, support situation awareness, and help clinicians prioritize alarms. Method: Experiment 1 ( n = 76) tested whether nonclinicians monitoring simulated patients benefited from vital sign information continuously displayed on an HWD while they performed a secondary calculation task. Experiment 2 ( n = 13) tested, across three separate experimental sessions, how effectively nursing trainees monitored simulated patients’ vital signs under three different display conditions while they assessed a simulated patient. Results: In Experiment 1, participants who had access to continuous patient information on an HWD responded to clinically important alarms 25.9% faster and were 6.7 times less likely to miss alarms compared to participants who only heard alarms. In Experiment 2, participants using an HWD answered situation awareness questions 18.9% more accurately overall than when they used alarms only. However, the effect was significant in only two of the three experimental sessions. Conclusion: HWDs may help users maintain continuous awareness of multiple remote processes without affecting their performance on ongoing tasks. Application: The outcomes may apply to contexts where access to continuous streams of information from remote locations is useful, such as patient monitoring or clinical supervision.

Head-worn displays have the potential to assist professionals in a wide variety of contexts by providing heads-up and hands-off information in real-time. For instance, nurses may be able to use head-worn displays to maintain peripheral awareness of the well-being of multiple patients while away from the nurses’ station and the patients’ beds. However, little is known about the advantages and disadvantages of head-worn displays in such contexts. In fact, many studies have shown that head-worn displays can lead to detriments in attention and visual performance. In three experiments, we tested people’s ability to detect simple, abrupt onset stimuli in peripheral vision when using a traditional computer monitor or Google Glass™. When using Google Glass, participants were significantly less likely to detect peripheral events. These data indicate that monocular optical see-through head-worn displays can make it harder to see peripheral stimuli. Stimuli need to be developed for head-worn displays that preserve their benefits for mobile users, while overcoming some of their disadvantages.

Objective To compare people's ability to detect peripherally presented stimuli on a monocular head-worn display (HWD) versus a conventional screen. Background Visual attention capture has been systematically investigated, but not with respect to HWDs. How stimulus properties affect attention capture is likely to be different on an HWD when compared to a traditional computer display. Method Participants performed an ongoing perceptual task and attempted to detect stimuli that were displayed peripherally on either a computer monitor or a monocular HWD. Results Participants were less able to detect peripheral stimuli when the stimuli were presented on a HWD than when presented on a computer monitor. Moreover, the disadvantage of the HWD was more pronounced when peripheral stimuli were less distinct and when the stimuli were presented further into the periphery. Conclusion Presenting stimuli on a monocular head-worn display reduces participants' ability to notice peripheral visual stimuli compared to presentation on a normal computer monitor. This effect increases as stimuli are presented further in the periphery, but can be ameliorated to a degree by using high-contrast stimuli. Application The findings are useful for designers creating visual stimuli intended to capture attention when viewed on a peripherally positioned monocular head-worn display.