Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Human Factors
Date Submitted: Nov 23, 2017
Open Peer Review Period: Nov 23, 2017 - Aug 16, 2018
Date Accepted: Dec 12, 2018
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
User-experience of Patients with Telehealth: Complementing a Clinical Trial with Human-Computer Interaction
ABSTRACT
Background:
The use of telehealth to monitor patients from home is on the rise. A telehealth technology is evaluated in a clinical trial with measures of health outcomes and cost effectiveness. However, what happens between a technology and the patients are not investigated during a clinical trial −the telehealth technology remains as a “black boxâ€. Meanwhile three decades of research in the discipline of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) presents design, implementation and evaluation of technologies with a primary emphasis on users. HCI research exposed the importance of user-experience (UX) as an essential part of technology development and evaluation.
Objective:
This research investigates Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) patients’ experiences of a telehealth in-home monitoring technology through HCI approach. How HCI could complement future telehealth clinical trials for patient-centred design and evaluation is also explored.
Methods:
We adopted an ethnographic philosophy to conduct a contextual inquiry due to time-limitations and semi-structured interviews of nine T2D patients. We defined the method as Clinical User-experience Evaluation (CUE). The patients were enrolled in a telehealth clinical trial of T2D. However, this research is an independent HCI study, conducted by information technologists and health researchers for a patient-centred evaluation of telehealth.
Results:
Key analytical findings depicted that patients value the benefits of in-home monitoring but the current device did not possess all functionalities that patients want. Results contain patients’ experiences and emotions while using the device, patients’ perceived benefits of the device, and domestication of the device in their homes. Further analysis showed the influence of the device on patients’ awareness, family involvement, and design implications for telehealth T2D.
Conclusions:
CUE could complement the telehealth clinical trial and uncovered knowledges about T2D patients’ experiences, future design implications and importance of understanding patients in telehealth.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.