Evaluation of User Interface for Medical Applications

Virtual Medication Evaluation (ME) is a mobile application designed to help patients with discordant chronic conditions (DCCs) prioritize and adhere to their medication goals. DCCs are health conditions in which patients have multiple, often unrelated, chronic illnesses that may need to be addressed concurrently but may also be associated with conflicting treatment instructions. Virtual ME allows a user (patient with DCCs) to help a virtual version of themselves (avatar) attain a desirable state of being. They do this by setting and adhering to their medication plans (e.g., taking medications on time or reporting symptoms/side effects) and allow new plans to be set before their situation gets worse. Our work proposes a novel framework that integrates the avatar into the medications evaluation process. The avatars are composed of different expressions (representing different states/moods of a patient) to encourage the patient to take medications on the pretext of maintaining the state of the avatar. The medication prescriptions and prioritization are generated by the machine learning algorithms. We evaluated Virtual ME and interviewed users to learn whether avatars and applications interface might be effective for motivating users to prioritize prescriptions and medications adherence. Our results show that real users demonstrate the effectiveness of the application.https://ecommons.udayton.edu/stander_posters/3474/thumbnail.jp