Design of an Application Interface for Clinical Gait-Analysis

Sammanfattning

A system that enables a cheap and accurate method to objectively measure the gait of patients has been developed at the university hospital of Umeå, and is undergoing clinical testing during the writing of this thesis. Presented in this thesis are the theory, process, and results of the development of a prototype and user interface, used for the analysis and presentation of the data from these gait measurements. Ideally, the physiotherapists conducting the examinations will be able to analyze and edit the data from these measurements themselves. The focus was therefore lain on optimizing the usability and understandability of the prototype for physiotherapists. Because of the optimization of usability for physiotherapists, the development of the prototype was based on the design processes of Design thinking and User centered design. It was an iterative process broken down into three iterations. Each iteration included the development of a prototype that increased in fidelity with each iteration. Tests and interviews were also included and they laid the foundation for the tuning of the prototypes. A final prototype was developed and it consisted of three main parts. In the first part (1) the user inserts information about the examination and patient, as well as retrieves the measurement data from the external measurement device. In the second part (2) the user analyses and edits the data from the measurement, and in the third part the user is shown a summary of the results from the measurement and calculations. Functions that show the correlation between graphs to ease the editing of the data were added to the prototype. Help-pages were also added, which enabled the users to get help when needed during the analysis of the data. The prototype was evaluated by the participants in the user tests using the system usability scale, and the prototype scored an average of 79.58 points (A-) with a median of 83.75 points (A). Which ranks the usability of the prototype as good to excellent. This shows that the usability of the prototype has been optimized for physiotherapists. It has been done by chunking the analysis and editing of the measurement-data in into separate sections and also by adding functions that show the correlation between the different graphs in the prototype. The optimization was also made possible by following established design processes and concepts within user experience and user interface design.