Measuring the Usability of Home Healthcare Devices Using Retrospective Measures

摘要

As the trend of home-delivered healthcare grows, the number of healthcare devices being utilized in the home setting also increases greatly, but the usability of all these devices has not been systematically exam-ined. While traditional in-lab usability testing is too time-consuming to make broad assessments of a large number of home healthcare devices, retrospective evaluation techniques using subjective usability surveys may be more promising because of their time and resource efficiency. However, the equivalence of data collected with these two techniques is not well understood for medical devices. This study collected usabil-ity data for multiple healthcare devices from 74 subjects in laboratory usability testing and 395 subjects using a retrospective assessment survey. Measures of overall subjective usability (measured using the Sys-tem Usability Scale) and the ISO usability metrics of effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction were cap-tured in both methods. Results show a consistency in satisfaction and overall subjective usability scores between the retrospective survey and laboratory testing, while measures of effectiveness and efficiency differed. These results suggest that retrospective surveys are capable of capturing the overall usability of a product by using the System Usability Scale metric. Such a finding should increase the confidence of re-searchers and practitioners who wish to use retrospective measures as a quick and economical technique in the large-scale assessment of medical devices. However, researchers should be cautious about measuring individual ISO usability metrics with retrospective surveys, as there are pronounced differences between lab-based usability testing and retrospective assessments.