Abstract
Background This article describes the development and evaluation of a distributed user interface
(DUI) application to assess visuomotor organization ability. This application enables
therapists to evaluate the acquired brain injury (ABI) on patients, and patients,
to perform the assessment on a touch screen while therapists can observe the assessment
process in real time on a separated monitor without interfering patients during the
process as in traditional methodologies employing physical elements.
Objectives The main goal of this research is the evaluation of the quality in use of DUIs in
the Pegboard Construction assessment with patients with ABI from the therapist perspective
in the area of occupational therapy.
Methods To evaluate our system, we have performed a usability evaluation following the ISO/IEC
25010 and ISO/IEC 25062 standards to evaluate software usability and quality and it
was conducted in collaboration with therapists and psychologists that have previously
worked with people with ABI in diagnostic and assessment tasks.
Results We show the results of the evaluation collected in a table that shows the completeness
rate for each user for both, assisted (i.e., the percentage of tasks where participants
performed with test director assistance) and unassisted tasks (i.e., the percentage
of tasks where participants completed tasks autonomously), the total time participants
required to complete proposed tasks, the number of mistakes participants performed
during the session, and the number of assists they required to finish proposed tasks.
In addition, we also evaluated the user satisfaction regarding our application using
the system usability scale.
Conclusion The use of information technologies in this field enables therapists to perform these
evaluations in a simpler, efficient, and automated way. This proposal enables patients
to perform the assessment as it is performed traditionally using paper providing them
with a touch screen in which they can easily insert a set of pins into the holes.
The usability evaluation of the proposal meets the appropriate design standards for
applications of this type, and this is demonstrated by the high degree of satisfaction
of the participants.
Keywords
cognition - assessment - occupational therapy - acquired brain injury - distributed
user interface
