The health and medical institutes and hospitalsare facing several challenges in the short and long term, i.e.demographic changes, demands on improving quality, limitedresources and cost requirements. To cope with these challenges,the health care sector needs to become more efficient, whilemaintaining and improving the quality of care. Efficient andtransparent information flow across the whole system plays a keyrole even in this context. Being able to analyze the patient flowsas the first step will provide the possibility to more efficientlymanage medical resources and better serve incoming patients. Inthis work, we have developed a web-based portal for interactiveanalysis of patient flow data to assist hospital authorities toimprove and optimize the time and quality of the providedservices. The developed tool facilitates short and long termoptimization of resource allocation by analyzing the past, as wellas current, patient flows, identifying bottlenecks and exploringthe reasons for the occurred waiting times.

This paper describes an explorative design study conducted in the scope of a collaborative research project in the district heating domain. In the scope of the project, we have arranged extensive field studies at two power plants to understand the workflows, problems, and needs of industrial operators. We relied on the gained knowledge to design and develop novel visual interfaces that would communicate the overall status of the district heating system at-a-glance. We aimed at exploring potential directions and alternatives beyond conventional industrial interfaces. One particular aspect of our research was related to how the physicality of the underlying industrial processes can be expressed by purely visual means. The paper introduces three high-fidelity prototypes demonstrating the novel visualizations developed. The paper explains the design choices made, namely the relation between the selected visual encodings to the requirements of the industrial operators tasks. Preliminary evaluation indicates industrial operators interest in the designed solutions. Future work will incorporate an extensive qualitative evaluation on site.

In recent years, advances in sensors, Internet and communication technologies opened many promising opportunities for remote services of industrial robots. With remote service applications, potential problems in robot systems can be detected before they happen, and prevented pro-actively avoiding costly production shut-downs. However, to be able to effectively perform remote service operations, remote support engineers need to analyse vast amounts of information. For a remote support engineer to be able to manage such amount of data, effective data visualization is crucial. Based on field studies and collected needs of support engineers working with industrial robots, we have designed and developed a prototype, i.e. one possible solution of an effective industrial fleet visualization, applied on the overheated robots use case. The initial validation of the prototype showed the benefits of such visual data presentation, as well as future directions.

Within industrial control rooms the trend has been to move away from physical towards digital interfaces. However, operators working in these control rooms have expressed feeling a loss of connection to the production process and machinery they are controlling. As such we present two prototypes Haptic Mouse and Shift Report Tool which were used to explore the re-introduction of physical user interfaces into industrial control rooms.

In recent years, IIoT continues to gain tractionintroducing promising opportunities to build powerful systemsand applications with new benefits to industry. However, as theindustrial systems become more complex, the number of alarmcalls in plants has exploded to a very large number. Having toomany alarms to handle hinders operators from taking the rightdecisions at the right time which potentially can lead to safety,reliability, privacy, and security issues. The work presentedin this paper is aimed at improving the safety of industrialoperations by better managing alarms and also increasing thereliability of the industrial operation by ensuring the processesare reliable. A main outcome of the project is a set of alarmdata mining algorithms and a high-fidelity prototype of a userinterface for reviewing and analyzing the mined alarm data.

Within the maritime domain there is a shift taking placetowards how troubleshooting (i.e. understanding andxing equipment issues) is being oered to maritimecustomers. Instead of travelling to ships around the world,service support engineers now remotely connect andaccess data from equipment sensors on-board. With thisgame-changing approach to xing equipment issues comesthe need to eectively support this change inwork-practice since engineers now need to solve complexproblems from an onshore location. Based on ndingsfrom eld studies, we present a prototype as a rst-steptowards addressing some of the key needs of theseengineers which include improving situation awareness forenhanced remote troubleshooting, integrating all relevantinformation for easier searching, and faster access torelevant personnel for help. The prototype was validatedwith domain specialists, and based on the ndings a set ofdesign recommendations is also presented.

Within industrial domains there is a need for control room operators to be in constant contact with the different processes they are responsible for controlling. With this responsibility comes the need to constantly be near their workstations in order to monitor, diagnose and quickly troubleshoot issues presented. These workstations, however, restrict operators in control rooms from moving freely within the control room itself, such as between their own and their colleague’s workstations since they cannot interact with the system from a distance. These systems also restrict those operators who need to continuously enter the control room from the plant/factory floor since interacting with process graphics requires them to remove all of their specialized equipment every time (e.g. large bulky safety gloves). We therefore present a concept for control room operators that supports their untethering from dedicated workstations, providing them with the ability to interact in a more flexible way.