Supporting communication in rehabilitation engineering teams

The objectives of this project were to examine how members of a colocated r ehabilitation engineering(a) team communicate during their work and hence d educe the implications of these communications for the design of video-base d technologies to support communication among members of a virtual rehabili tation engineering team. Twenty-four assessment clinic sessions conducted b y rehabilitation engineering team were recorded on videotape over a period of 3 years. These tapes were analyzed in considerable detail using a schema to identify and classify the talk and actions of the team members. Combini ng talk and actions with artifacts(b) is a mechanism used by designers to d evelop ideas and communicate them to others. Speakers rely on actions to su pport and make their talk lucid. Cooperation based on sharing artifacts is a strength of face-to-face interaction. Participants can experience artifac ts and observe others using the artifacts. Tools such as videoconferencing to support virtual rehabilitation teams will have to provide the participan ts with the ability to see often quite subtle gestures and actions if they are to grasp the meaning of the talk. Increased understanding how a team co mmunicates visually complex data may (1) aid development of next generation videoconferencing equipment to better support distributed designers and re habilitation engineers and (2) guide development of techniques to enhance t he quality of visual data presentation in current videoconferencing systems .