Visualization of Data Regarding Infections Using Eye Tracking Techniques

Abstract

Objective To evaluate ease of use and usefulness for nurses of visualizations of infectious disease transmission in a hospital. Design An observational study was used to evaluate perceptions of several visualizations of data extracted from electronic health records designed using a participatory approach. Twelve nurses in the master’s program in an urban research-intensive nursing school participated in May 2015. Methods A convergent parallel mixed method was used to evaluate nurses’ perceptions on ease of use and usefulness of five visualization conveying trends in hospital infection transmission applying think-aloud, interview, and eye-tracking techniques. Findings Subjective data from the interview and think-aloud techniques indicated that participants preferred the traditional line graphs in simple data representation due to their familiarity, clarity, and easiness to read. An objective quantitative measure of eye movement analysis (444,421 gaze events) identified a high degree of participants’ attention span in infographics in all three scenarios. All participants responded with the correct answer within 1 min in comprehensive tests. Conclusions A user-centric approach was effective in developing and evaluating visualizations for hospital infection transmission. For the visualizations designed by the users, the participants were easily able to comprehend the infection visualizations on both line graphs and infographics for simple visualization. The findings from the objective comprehension test and eye movement and subjective attitudes support the feasibility of integrating user-centric visualization designs into electronic health records, which may inspire clinicians to be mindful of hospital infection transmission. Future studies are needed to investigate visualizations and motivation, and the effectiveness of visualization on infection rate. Clinical Relevance This study designed visualization images using clinical data from electronic health records applying a user-centric approach. The design insights can be applied for visualizing patient data in electronic health records.

Application of eye‐tracking in nursing research: A scoping review

“…Seven studies were related to usability evaluations of mobile applications (Ehrler et al., 2018 ; Staab et al., 2022 ), different medical interface design (Dzisko et al., 2022 ), different code carts (Chen & Law, 2023 ), and different data/process visualization (Marquard et al., 2013 ; Wang & Or, 2020 ; Yoon et al., 2016 ).…”

“…Concurrent think‐aloud refers to encouraging participants to express their feelings and ideas in real time during the experiment while, in retrospective think‐aloud, the participants are shown their own eye‐movement gaze path videos after the experiment and express their thoughts and feelings aloud. In this review, think‐aloud was adopted in seven studies, three of which used retrospective think‐aloud (Al‐Moteri et al., 2022 ; Chen & Law, 2023 ; Yoon et al., 2016 ) and four of which used CTA (Anton et al., 2023 ; Currie et al., 2018 ; Ehrler et al., 2018 ; Henneman, Gawlinski, et al., 2017 ).…”

Evaluation of a visual tool co-developed for training hospital staff on the prevention and control of the spread of healthcare associated infections

“…Yoon et al [ 21 ] used eye tracking and think aloud protocols to evaluate student reactions to visualisations conveying trends in hospital infection transmission. These visualisations of aspects such as prevalence of infection spanned a range from static images of line graphs, through various static two-dimensional infographics, to static three-dimensional representations of a ward area.…”

Evaluating the effectiveness and efficiency of risk communication for maps depicting the hazard of COVID‐19

“…Some researchers have proved that valid information acquisition and risk perception are important factors in individual preparedness as to epidemic control (Kiss, Cassell, Recker, & Simon, 2010 ; Poletto, Boëlle, & Colizza, 2016 ). However, prior studies about infectious disease maps were mostly targeted at experts as reader groups, such as hospital staff, risk managers, and visualized system developers (Alcíbar, 2018 ; Yoon, Cohen, Cato, Liu, & Larson, 2016 ). So, there are still insufficient public‐oriented infectious map studies and corresponding evaluation approaches.…”