This paper suggests an approach based on usability engineering, used to assess the usability of machines and plants in the agrofood industry, aiming to enhance machines efficacy, efficiency and safety with a development focused on users’ needs. Furthermore, the article examines the validation of the suggested approach through its application in a case study regarding a washing machine for the production of extra virgin olive oil. Firstly, it was necessary to identify the target cluster. For this reason, only Tuscan high quality extra virgin olive oil manufacturers were selected. The selected producers are of between 30 and 65 years old, with working experience in the field of at least 10 years. Once the cluster was identified, through brainstorming, the critical phases of the process were identified. According to the results, the washing process was considered the most critical phase. The reached conclusions were analysed and translated into technical aspects through the Quality Function Deployment. The predominant needs to be introduced in the new washing machine were related to the reduction of processing time, the improvement of washing system, the reduction of water consumption, and the increase of worker safety. Successively, a virtual prototype was developed and tested with 8 experts. Afterwards, a usability test was performed with 15 users. Two different olive washing machines were evaluated (traditional vs new machine). The Wilcoxon signed-rank test was utilised for users’ scores interpretation. According to P-values (ranging from P<0.001 to P=0.008) several statistically significant differences emerged between the two washing machines. In particular, remarkable differences regarding efficacy, efficiency, usability, human-machine interaction, reliability and an increase in safety were highlighted. Moreover, the results indicate that the new washing machine is overall perceived as more usable machine. In conclusion, the results are encouraging and give robustness both to the proposed methodological approach and to the improvement of the new washing machine.

The application of the Italian law No. 24/2017, which focused on patient safety and medical liability, in the Italian National Health Service has been evaluated by a survey conducted five years after the promulgation of the law. The law required the establishment of healthcare risk management and patient safety centers in all Italian regions and the appointment of a Clinical Risk Manager (CRM) in all Italian public and private healthcare facilities. This study demonstrates that five years after the approval of the law, it has not yet been fully implemented. The survey revealed a lack of adequate permanent staff in all the Regional Centers, with two employees on average per Center. Few meetings were held with the Regional Healthcare System decision-makers with less than four meetings per year. This reduces the capacity to carry out functions. In addition, the role of the CRMs is weak in most healthcare facilities. More than 20% of CRMs have other roles in the same organization. Some important tasks have reduced application, e.g., assessment of the inappropriateness risk (reported only by 35.3% of CRM) and use of patient safety indicators for monitoring hospitals (20.6% of CRM). The function of the Regional Centers during the COVID-19 pandemic was limited despite the CRMs being very committed. The CRMs units undertake limited research and have reduced collaboration with citizen associations. Despite most of the CRMs believing that the law has had an important role in improving patient safety, 70% of them identified clinicians’ resistance to change and lack of funding dedicated to implementing the law as the main barriers to the management of risk.

The main information systems design techniques focus, almost exclusively, on the functional requirements of the system to be implemented. In its standard formulation, axiomatic design has such characteristics. However, in complex operational environments, this can lead to the identification of functionally valid solutions, but do not perfectly adhere to the system’s nonfunctional requirements. In specific operational contexts, particularly in information systems design, neglecting nonfunctional requirements has been identified as a major threat to projects, which can prevent their proper utilization throughout the design process. In this paper, we focus on nonfunctional requirements in axiomatic design, whose impact assessments can only be performed according to a heuristic basis, i.e., by expert judgment. However, the value assignment by experts can lead to a decisional indeterminacy or cognitive bias. To overcome these limitations, we propose the adoption of a methodological approach based on a reinterpretation of the information axiom of axiomatic design in terms of a multi-criteria decision problem. This approach allows the formal inclusion of nonfunctional requirements in the design process, which can be accomplished by setting them as evaluation attributes to achieve the robust design solution. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to evaluate alternative design solutions based on the information theory of entropy, which then comply with the nonfunctional requirements. We illustrate our approach by a case study, which implements the process of managing patients in home care and compare it with the mathematical-based analytic hierarchy process method proposed in the literature. According to our method, the robust solution is computed in just a single step saving significant computational cost with respect to the iterative-based analytic hierarchy process method. In this perspective, the proposed approach can support information systems designers in decision making as it allows to select the most suitable solution for the context in which it must operate.

Nowadays, information systems are evolving towards increasingly interconnected, smart, and self-adaptive models. This transformation has led to the representation of the systems themselves in terms of natural ecosystems. Similar to the natural environment, the virtual world can be threatened by specific forms of pollution, such as illegitimate access to the system, unwanted changes to data, and loss of information, which affect the only resource it possesses, i.e., data. In order to provide proactive protection of data integrity and confidentiality, in this paper we consider the well-known principles of privacy by design and privacy by default in the design phase of system development. To this end, we propose an approach based on axiomatic design, which allows us to implement these two principles through an appropriate reinterpretation of the information axiom, in terms of privacy impact assessment. We illustrate our approach by a case study, which implements the process of managing patients in home care. However, the proposed method can be applied to processing systems that provide services. The main result achieved is to select the most digitally sustainable design solution, i.e., the one that best prevents the threats mentioned above.

In recent years remote patient monitoring systems, which are conceived to monitor patient and store the recorded data, employ Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). In health care systems, if on the one hand the SOA features allow enriching the offer of services to patients and their families, on the other hand the problem arises of selecting the most appropriate set of web services for homogeneous groups of users or for each individual clinical case. In this paper, we propose a methodology based on the Axiomatic Design for the composition and selection of web services, which are based on the case stories studied, built using semi-structured interviews to different stakeholders involved in the care process. The proposed methodology detects in a systematic way all functional requirements by taking into account the different stakeholders involved in the process and their interactions. Thus, it identifies the interested actors for a specific health protocol, and consider all information to be exchanged and the Web Services to be implemented. The development of this methodology opens interesting scenarios even in areas not currently affected by such systems, such as health and safety at work for monitoring patients with chronic illnesses or for their work reintegration following acute clinical events. A specific case study is considered in order to illustrate the proposed approach.