Mobile Self-Triage Applications: A Usability Perspective

Abstract

Each person faces a health problem differently. Many people tend to visit an emergency department immediately without any regards to the scale of acuity of their disorder. Some of these visits are not necessary and hence lead to overcrowding of emergency de-partments, increase patients’ waiting time, and ultimately lead to overutilization of healthcare resources. At the other end of the spectrum, some people do not visit their physician when they should. One solution to this problem is to provide a reliable source of information that would allow people to assess their health condition (self-triage) in a way that helps reduce the number of inappropriate visits and promote warranted visits to emergency departments. This research proposes a new and user-friendly self-triage mobile application called Symptoms Pal, which allows lay people to use their health data to assess the pres-ence of potential health concerns. Using diagnostic algorithms developed by physicians on the basis of medical evidence, the application requires users to answer a short series of questions about their symptoms. Symptoms Pal then provides some basic information about the possible problem and aims to inform users about whether they should seek im-mediate medical attention such as visiting an emergency department, or see a family doc-tor, or do self-care. The usability of Symptoms Pal was evaluated by conducting a study involving 34 participants. Several strengths and weaknesses of the usability and perceived usefulness of the application were identified and led to a revised version and additional recommendations. The thesis contributes 25 reusable requirements and validated user interface de-sign artefacts for self-triage mobile applications.