Digitising a medical clerking system with multimodal interaction support

The Royal Bournemouth and Christchurch Hospitals (RBCH) use a series of paper forms to record their interactions with patients; while these have been highly successful, the world is moving digitally and the National Health Service (NHS) has planned to be completely paperless by 2020. Using a project management methodology called Scrum that is supported by a usability evaluation technique called System Usability Scale (SUS) and a workload measurement technique called NASA TLX, a prototype web application system was built and evaluated for the client. The prototype used a varied set of input mediums including voice, text and stylus to ensure that users were more likely to adopt the system. This web based system was successfully developed and evaluated at RBCH. This evaluation showed that the application was usable and accessible but raised many different questions about the nature of software in hospitals. While the project looked at how different input mediums can be used in a hospital, it found that just because it is possible to input data is some familiar format (e.g. voice), it is not always in the best interest of the end-users and the patients.

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