Guided Research Felix Eckert

Evaluierung der Benutzerfreundlichkeit von Acadela: eine domänenspezifische Sprache für die Definition von klinischen Pfaden in Plattformen für integrierte Versorgung

Abstract

Motivation:

Treating and diagnosing diseases is complicated and indeterministic depending on the patient conditions, regulation, and standardized medical practices. Therefore, clinical pathways are developed to systematically define adaptive treatment and diagnosis procedures for particular diseases. This gives medical experts standard guidelines to conduct treatment. Overall, clinical pathways set out to contribute to two primary goals: ensuring precise and timely treatment procedures and adaptively manage the workflow.

Solution:

While clinical pathways are a well-established and useful tool, the modeling tools for creating them are intricate and require sophisticated interactions. In many applications, a combination of mouse and keyboard is required to accomplish a task, which can be cumbersome and limit productivity. The efficiency can be boosted by providing a purely text-based interface. One approach to achieve a text-based human-computer interaction interface is Domain Specific Languages (DSL). They define languages that are bound to a designated application domain. This is in contrast to general programming languages which are applied to develop a wide range of features. By specializing the language to suit the background and domain knowledge of the end-user, an abstraction of the language is possible, which simplifies the usage for non-technical people.

Method:

Our assumption is, using DSLs with medical, colloquial language, and intuitive grammar for clinical pathways could enhance the ease of learning and usability to doctors, which increases the user experience and productivity.

Evaluation:

In the context of this guided research, our study wants to evaluate this hypothesis by conducting a user study with medical experts in different departments. In this user study, the participants will model their clinical pathways using a DSL. The focus of the research is on the comprehensiveness of the syntax and grammar of the DSL and its usability. To evaluate the usability, our study collects quantitative feedback on the ease of use and the ease of learning using the SUS (System Usability Scale). The grammar and syntax are qualitatively evaluated by interviewing medical experts about the strengths, drawbacks of the DSL, suggestions of improvement, and user preferences. The expected outcomes of our study are the recommended lists of keywords and structures to define elements in clinical pathways, the user experience regarding the features of the DSL, and necessary future improvements in terms of usability and language design.