Ignorance of interaction programming is killing people

Interaction programming is a term introduced to distinguish the programming aspects of interaction from the human aspects. A good interaction programming has to be engineered into a device's design by good programmers. A poor interaction programming is a significant programming factor in medication incidents. A typical interactive medical device allows users to enter numbers in almost any format with or without decimals, misleading zeros, and all without any warnings. Decimal point errors are one of the simplest drug calculation errors to understand. Using a conventional calculator, a dose calculation would report very few errors. If the calculator communicated with the electronic patient record, all numbers could be automatically provided. Program specifications and source code must be checked using formal tools, otherwise inconsistencies and other problems will not be detected.