Life Supporting Technologies

This paper presents technical solutions for achieving high usability in user interfaces for the continuous assessment of chronic diseases. Our overall goal is to design usable systems, which support specific users in their specific context to reach their particular goals effectively, efficiently and with satisfaction. Usability is a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use, defining five quality components: learnability, efficiency, memorability, errors and satisfaction. Our approach is to keep interfaces as simple and clear as possible. We have worked within the MyHeart project, which deals with patients with chronic cardiovascular diseases. Patients are equipped with an intelligent biomedical garment capable of acquiring, processing and evaluating physiological data such as ECVs. The results are sent via a wireless personal area network to a mobile phone or PDA and from there to a server farm. The mobile device will include an avatar that will perform the interaction with the user in a non-intrusive way and graphical elements with speech synthesis support. The best way to successfully apply usability criteria is putting the maximum effort before the design phase. In latter phases of the development, when designing the presentation model, we will consider the quality model previously defined, taking into account different heuristics, usability guidelines and accessibility criteria to improve the quality of the layouts