Harold W. Thimbleby
- Courses1
- Reviews1
- School: Swansea University
- Campus:
- Department: Computer Science
- Email address: Join to see
- Phone: Join to see
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Location:
Swansea, SW - Dates at Swansea University: October 2015 - October 2015
- Office Hours: Join to see
Biography
Swansea University - Computer Science
See Change Fellow in Digital Health at Swansea University
Higher Education
Harold
Thimbleby
Swansea, United Kingdom
On 9 February 2015, The Times said that driverless cars would soon all but eliminate human error on the roads, and the government was investing millions in trials .... On Februaty 10, The Times published my letter ....
* human error is a fact of life, it can't be eliminated. Designers make errors, not just drivers. It is fantasy to suggest driverless cars will "just" work
* Google - who are current 'drivers' in driverless cars - gave up on healthcare
* healthcare currently kills more people than cars - so why isn't the government investing in making healthcare safer instead of playing with fantasy cars?
* and if you come to us, we have amazing ideas on how to invest productively to improve safety and efficiency.....
Experience
Royal College of Physicians
Expert adviser to the Health Informatics Unit
Harold worked at Royal College of Physicians as a Expert adviser to the Health Informatics Unit
Middlesex University
Visiting Professor
Harold worked at Middlesex University as a Visiting Professor
University College London
Visiting Professor
Harold worked at University College London as a Visiting Professor
Swansea University
See Change Fellow in Digital Health
I now have a full-time fellowship to challenge and change healthcare computing to make it safer and more effective.
The plan is to write a book joined up with media - film, lectures, TV, social - to shape and share the message. As well as working with media professionals to get a focussed high-impact message, I will work closely with healthcare professionals, regulators and industry so that the message has authority and leverage. I am so excited!
Do get in touch!Swansea University
Professor
I do research in user interface design, human factors, human error, particularly to help make safety critical devices (like medical devices, infusion pumps, dialysis machines, ...) safer and easier to use.
Gresham College
28th Professor of Geometry
Harold worked at Gresham College as a 28th Professor of Geometry
Education
London University
PhD
Computer Science
My PhD must have been one of the first in human-computer interaction - in fact, HCI wasn't called HCI in those days, but MMI - man machine interaction! How things have changed. I was supervised by George Coulouris, and worked at the Systems Lab in QMC - the first place to get Unix outside of the USA. Along with others in the lab, I must be one of the country's earliest C programmers.University of London
BSc, MSc, PhD
Publications
Improving safety in medical devices and systems
IEEE
We need to improve healthcare technologies — electronic patient records, medical devices — by reducing use error and, in particular, unnoticed errors, since unnoticed errors cannot be managed by clinicians to reduce patient harm. Every system we have examined has multiple opportunities for safer design, suggesting a safety scoring system. Making safety scores visible will enable all stakeholders (regulators, procurers, clinicians, incident investigators, journalists, and of course patients) to be more informed, and hence put pressure on manufacturers to improve design safety. In the longer run, safety scores will need to evolve, both to accommodate manufacturers improving device safety and to accommodate insights from further research in design-induced error.
Improving safety in medical devices and systems
IEEE
We need to improve healthcare technologies — electronic patient records, medical devices — by reducing use error and, in particular, unnoticed errors, since unnoticed errors cannot be managed by clinicians to reduce patient harm. Every system we have examined has multiple opportunities for safer design, suggesting a safety scoring system. Making safety scores visible will enable all stakeholders (regulators, procurers, clinicians, incident investigators, journalists, and of course patients) to be more informed, and hence put pressure on manufacturers to improve design safety. In the longer run, safety scores will need to evolve, both to accommodate manufacturers improving device safety and to accommodate insights from further research in design-induced error.
Reducing number entry errors: solving a widespread, serious problem
Royal Society
Number entry is ubiquitous: it is required in many fields including science, healthcare, education, government, mathematics and finance. People entering numbers are to be expected to make errors, but shockingly few systems make any effort to detect, block or otherwise manage errors. Worse, errors may be ignored but processed in arbitrary ways, with unintended results. A standard class of error (defined in the paper) is an ‘out by 10 error’, which is easily made by miskeying a decimal point or a zero. In safety-critical domains, such as drug delivery, out by 10 errors generally have adverse consequences. Here, we expose the extent of the problem of numeric errors in a very wide range of systems. An analysis of better error management is presented: under reasonable assumptions, we show that the probability of out by 10 errors can be halved by better user interface design. We provide a demonstration user interface to show that the approach is practical.
