Introduction to Healthcare Technologies in Practice

There is widespread recognition that the design, development and deployment of new technologies are not simply matters of technical competence and that the success of technologies depends just as much on the extent to which they resonate with their local contexts of use. Indeed, the failure of new technologies often can be attributed to difficulties for users in making technologies 'at home' in their very practical worlds of work. Furthermore it is often argued that designers attempt to force through change with new technologies, which can impose an 'operational straightjacket' [3] on staff, impeding their abilities to undertake basic work tasks. There are of course many mundane failures of, and frustrations with, technologies in contemporary society; however, the potential impacts of poor technologies are felt particularly acutely within life critical and resource constrained health services. Such problems in combination with the rapid expansion of the use of information and communications technologies in the health services has led to a number of calls to consider more closely the practical circumstances in which medical technologies are used [1, 2, 4]. It is interesting to note that within other fields concerned with the design, development and deployment of new technologies, there is also an increasing emphasis on studies that explore the local contexts in which existing technologies are used and technologies in the making will be used. So, design projects in areas such as human-computer interaction (HCI)