Development of an Ergonomics Checklist for the Evaluation of Medical Tablet Personal Computers

This paper focuses on the ergonomics evaluation of Medical Tablet Personal Computers (MTPCs). The research questions for the study were “What are the key ergonomics issues in the safe and effective use of a Medical Tablet PC” and “How can we evaluate new Medical Tablet PC concepts in the early stages of the design process”. The aims of the study were to develop an ergonomics checklist for the evaluation of MTPCs and to identify key ergonomics issues in the design as well as in the usage of MTPCs. In the first step of the study we undertook an overview of the checklists developed for computer workstations and mobile computer devices that are found in the human factors literature. This overview resulted in a categorization of checklists based on their organizations, rating scales, general purposes and level of detail. In the second step of the study an interview was conducted with 29 doctors; with a wide variety of specialization; in various hospitals to explore important issues as well as problem caused by computer usage. As the result of the analysis of answers given to interview questions and analysis of other checklists based on computers and medical devices 5 key concepts were chosen as the structural elements of the ergonomics checklist that is the primary output of this study, These key concepts are mobile usage, portability, office usage, cleaning and disinfection and hardware evaluation.