Reading Digital Medicine Leaflets in Mobile Devices an Interactive Study Conducted in Brazil (original) (raw)
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Reading digital medicine leaflets in mobile devices
Design, User Experience, and Usability. User Experience Design for Everyday Life Applications and Services, 2014
This paper describes an interaction study conducted in Brazil that aimed to investigate how people read a digital medicine leaflet in a mobile device. This insert summarizes the main typographic characteristics of Brazilian current digital leaflets. Tests were held with the participation of 20 volunteer individuals and consisted of four stages: (1) definition of participants’ profile, (2) task 1: finding specific information in the digital leaflet, (3) Task 2: reading the digital leaflet in a mobile device, (4) follow-up interview. According to the results of the interaction test, there is evidence that the current structure of the digital medicine leaflets in Brazil is not designed for access via mobile devices. The findings of this study point to the need of information design guidelines for the Brazilian digital medicine leaflets, considering interactivity and navigability aspects. It is important to propose new solutions for digital leaflets and test them with people, in order to ensure the legibility and usability of these documents.
Improving the usability of patient information leaflets
Patient Education and Counseling, 2010
Objective: This study assesses the usability of three patient information leaflets and attempts to improve them while complying with the current EU regulations. Methods: Three original leaflets were tested among 154 potential users. Every participant answered 15 scenario questions for one of the leaflets. The leaflets were subsequently redesigned based on the test results and evidence-based Document Design principles. The revised texts were tested among 164 participants. Results: All three original leaflets suffered from usability problems, especially problems related to finding relevant information. On average, only 75% of the topics could be located. Comprehension of the information, once found, was around 90%. The revisions led to better performance. Information was found faster and more successful. Comprehension scores were higher as well. A follow-up study shows that these findings can be generalized over paper formats. Conclusion: Although the current EU regulations for patient information leaflets do not guarantee leaflet usability, the leaflets can be improved somewhat within the regulations. However, further research should evaluate the text structure currently imposed on leaflets.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2014
This Patient information leaflet-PIL provides support to medicine usage. However, there is a lack of empirical evidence on the usability of PILs since most research has focused on their readability and legibility, and legal regulations worldwide have neglected their usability aspects. Considering the importance of this matter, a proposal for assessing PILs' usability is presented here, consisting of three phases: (1) task analysis diagram flow, (2) interaction test, and (3) follow-up interview, and the outputs are analyzed in a qualitative manner. To validate the usability assessment proposed, a study was conducted in Brazil with 60 participants on using medicines differing in their pharmaceutical presentation, based upon the instructions in their PILs. The results showed a direct relation between task complexity-errors; and the decision points-actions/ steps. The usability assessment aids in identifying drawbacks in the PILs design and information flow, thus, providing support to improvements towards their effectiveness in medicine usage.
Ideas in Marketing: Finding the New and Polishing the Old, 2014
More people are expected to access online information from mobile devices than from personal computers by 2015. This study asks whether the websites of health organizations have taken into consideration the greater difficulty of reading text on the small screens of mobile phones. Specifically, this study examines readability scores of traditional websites and mobile websites among 55 American health organizations. While 22% of the organizations studied had mobile websites, only one-third of the mobile websites had better readability than their traditional website counterparts. The Grade Level Score for these mobile websites averaged 6.5 compared to 8.5 for their traditional websites but none had superior readability of 5 th grade level or lower. Conversely, another one-third of the mobile websites had worse readability than their traditional website counterparts. These findings suggest most health organizations have yet to leverage the accessibility of online information through mobile phones.
Empirical evaluation of a mobile application for assisting physicians in creating medical notes
2006
Mobile devices are becoming pervasive in medical informatics. A common practice among physicians is to take notes during ward rounds, which helps them write the formal medical note. MedNote is a mobile application designed to support this practice. We conducted an experimental evaluation, where seven medical interns watched a video projection of three clinical cases, using different devices (PDA, Tablet PC, Paper) to take notes. Participants were required to elaborate a formal medical note with the help of these personal notes. We measured the time required to complete the tasks as well as their perception of comfort with each device. Using the application proved to be faster in elaborating the formal note when compared to paper, and all users agreed that the structure of fields in MedNote was very useful as a guideline. In contrast, we found that entering data in MedNote was somewhat difficult and slow compared to using paper.
Patients’ views on electronic patient information leaflets
Pharmacy Practice, 2016
Background: Information in society and in health care is currently undergoing a transition from paper to digital formats, and the main source of information will probably be electronic in the future. Objective: To explore patients' use and perceptions of the patient information leaflet included in the medication package, and their attitude towards a transition to an electronic version. Methods: The data was collected during October to November 2014 among individuals in SouthEastern Sweden, using a questionnaire (n=406, response rate 78%) and interviews (n=15). Results: The questionnaire showed that the majority of the respondents (52%) occasionally read the patient information leaflet, 37% always read it, and 11% never read it. Almost half of the patients (41%) were positive towards reading the patient information leaflet electronically while 32% were hesitant and 26% neutral. A majority of the patients would request to get the patient information leaflet printed at the pharmacy if it was not included in the package. There were differences in attitude related to age and gender. The interviews showed that patients had mixed views on a transition to an electronic patient information leaflet. The patients perceived several positive aspects with an electronic patient information leaflet but were concerned about elderly patients. Conclusion: Although many were positive towards reading the patient information leaflet electronically, the majority prefer the patient information leaflet in paper form. Providing appropriate and useful eHealth services for patients to access the patient information leaflet electronically, along with education, could prepare patients for a transition to electronic patient information leaflet.
Patient Information Leaflets accompanying medicine are heavily regulated by European and individual national legislation in the way they need to be designed, written, and produced. Further, the design of these leaflets is still firmly anchored in a printed document-based paradigm. This means that transposing them for use by mobile devices such as smart phones or tablets is a process that is not well understood. This paper shows how Information Designers can offer insights to a problem that will become increasingly prevalent as the demands on the 'message' surpass the medium of the paper based document and seek to harvest the potential of mobile devices to offer hypertext, multimedia and tailored information. This paper investigates the problem via a case study examining pain relieving (Fentanyl) transdermal patches and offers some lessons learnt from this experience, in order to open up and shed light on this emerging aspect of information design practice.
Mobile computer Web-application design in medicine: some research based guidelines
Universal Access in the Information Society, 2007
Designing Web-applications is considerably different for mobile computers (handhelds, Personal Digital Assistants) than for desktop computers. The screen size and system resources are more limited and end-users interact differently. Consequently, detecting handheld-browsers on the server side and delivering pages optimized for a small client form factor is inevitable. The authors discuss their experiences during the design and development of an application for medical research, which was designed for both mobile and personal desktop computers. The investigations presented in this paper highlight some ways in which Web content can be adapted to make it more accessible to mobile computing users. As a result, the authors summarize their experiences in design guidelines and provide an overview of those factors which have to be taken into consideration when designing software for mobile computers. ''The old computing is about what computers can do, the new computing is about what people can do'' (Leonardo's laptop: human needs and the new computing technologies, MIT Press, 2002).
Editorial: Information Design for Health and Wellbeing
InfoDesign - Revista Brasileira de Design da Informação
In the health context, the accessibility and understandability of information are particularly important issues, especially if we take into account that users are in a situation of fragility or urgency, as well as considering particular population groups such as the elderly or children. Information is critical to good health and wellbeing on many levels, for example, for health promotion and disease prevention, patient-physician communication, prescribing, labelling and medication adherence, wayfinding, information flow and overall patient safety in hospital settings. Not to mention visualisations that simplify complex data into user-friendly graphics that support decision-making-from governments monitoring a planetary-threatening epidemic to personal health self-tracking in smartwatches. Design plays a great responsibility in guiding health providers, users and other stakeholders through the maze of information to ensure accessibility, inclusivity, reliability, efficiency, comprehension and engagement. This special edition on Information Design for Health and Wellbeing presents research articles from different regions of Brazil that address these issues from various perspectives. The opening article, 'Development of an infographic as a warning for the prevention of penile cancer in Maranhão,' authored by Lobo and colleagues, describes the development of an infographic to raise population awareness about the challenging topic of male intimate health care. With a usercentered design approach, the authors explored contextual barriers and enablers for improving health literacy. Two articles address issues of information flow in hospital settings. The first, 'Information design considerations in graphic artifacts of the diet prescription process: on the information flow in a public university hospital', describes a case study by Sampaio and Spinillo to map information related to the complex nutrition care process of hospitalised patients. The authors investigated the hand-filled documents that support recording, storing, viewing and retrieving the information. The study's result is a flowchart focusing on graphic artifacts to visualise steps, activities and professionals involved in the process. The paper highlights the need to evaluate the design aspects of handwritten graphic documents to provide error-free prescriptions in hospitals. The article 'Informational barriers and recommendations for patient inclusion in a Brazilian outpatient oncological service' by König and colleagues is focused on the accessibility to health services. The authors observed problems regarding information and communication at the health facilities, including failures in signalling and a lack of alternative communication resources for people with disabilities.