A framework to adapt WIMP interfaces to No-Touch

• Autor(a) principal: João da Silva Fernandes
• Data de Publicação: 2014
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://hdl.handle.net/10216/89369
• topic: Engenharia electrotécnica, electrónica e informática; Electrical engineering, Electronic engineering, Information engineering

With the introduction of technology in hospitals the number of health-care associated infections saw an increase, as doctors would use poorly sterilized computers before interacting with the patient. There are workarounds to these infections, such as better sterilization procedures for technology, which is still imperfect, sterilization procedures for the doctor, which is time consuming and use of an assistant to interact with he computer at the doctor's orders, which is also time consuming and can be frustrating for the doctor. No-touch interfaces provide an opportunity to solve these infections. However, resources for developers who wish to implement these interfaces are scarce, with science fiction movies such as Minority Report still acting as one of the main guidelines for interaction design. A collaboration was made with Glintt HS to understand the interactions required by doctors in the operating room, using Glintt's eResults application as a study case for the development of a framework to easily adapt any web-based interface to a no-touch interface. This application allows doctors to browse through the patient's clinical history and view results, which may be documents, images or videos. Literature in this area shows that there are very few guidelines for the development of no-touch interfaces and the only existing frameworks are simple mouse replacements with no impact on the interface itself. Regarding the operating room, the Microsoft Kinect has been successfully used for image manipulation in the past two years. The technological alternatives are standard RGB cameras and the LeapMotion, but the Microsoft Kinect proves itself more adequate as it possesses a depth sensor and a maximum range of 4 meters. A web framework was developed that allowed the developer to create the no-touch interfaces by merely adding the classes offered by the framework to the HTML elements they wish to make interactive via no-touch. Furthermore, the framework offers an API that can receive JSON messages representing input from a no-touch device and processes the interaction, and a native program was made to pass the Kinect's tracking data to the API. Development followed a Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation (RITE) methodology, where various interactions were implemented and tested with one or two users, for each of the various interaction components, such as button pressing, list scrolling or image rotation. After each component had satisfactory interactions, a no-touch prototype of Glintt's eResults was made and, finally, larger usability tests were done on this prototype to measure the efficiency of the adaptation.