Study of text and numeric input modalities on PDAs.

摘要

This study is about textual and numerical input modalities on PDAs for supporting nursing tasks. Four input modalities for textual data input and four for numerical data input are compared and discussed. A total of six experiments were conducted to test these input modalities.; The methods compared in the numerical data entry experiments were an increment/decrement interface, a custom made numerical keyboard, a PDA's software keyboard, and a PDA's Graffiti. For the textual data entry experiments the methods compared were a PDA's hardware keyboard, a PDA's software keyboard, a PDA's voice recorder and Graffiti. The PDA use for the experiments was a Sony Clie PEG-NZ90.; The study revealed that for textual data input none of the method resulted clearly superior to the others. However, the voice recorder resulted the fastest method. Thus, the voice recorder should be seriously considered for nursing tasks requiring significant textual data input. However, there are issues of transcription, confidentiality and security that need to be addressed when this modality is used for clinical applications.; For numerical data input the study revealed that the custom made numeric soft-keyboard was the best method of the four. One important finding of this study was the inferior performance exhibited with Graffiti. Thus, the results of this study do not encourage adopting Graffiti for clinical tasks.