Assessment of relative importance of tablet computer features in supporting direct electronic documentation of encounters by eye care professionals.

Extensive utilization of mobile devices at the point of care will depend on device acceptance by the providers. We conducted focus groups involving nine eye care professionals to evaluate and elucidate the most important features of a tablet Personal Computer (PC) for data entry at the point of care. Ease of use, and quality and size of display were considered to be the most critical features of such a mobile device by the majority of the participants.

Adapting the human-computer interface for reading literacy and computer skill to facilitate collection of information directly from patients.

Clinical information collected directly from patients is critical to the practice of medicine. Past efforts to collect this information using computers have had limited utility because these efforts required users to be facile with the computerized information collecting system. In this paper we describe the design, development, and function of a computer system that uses recent technology to overcome the limitations of previous computer-based data collection tools by adapting the human-computer interface to the native language, reading literacy, and computer skills of the user.