The success of medical therapy strongly depends on the compliance of the patients and on their understanding of the importance of the therapy measures. Therefore, patients often have to take medication regularly or have to measure vital parameters themselves or do both to achieve sufficient therapeutic effect. This contains a huge source of error caused by various factors. People forget to take their medication, to measure their vital parameters or do not track them correctly etc. This lack and inconsistency of data costs a lot of time, which is crucial especially in emergency situations.
How VAP works
VAP is an Application that allows the users to record static health data such as allergies, previous illnesses and medication as well as continous health data such as vital parameters as blood pressure, coagulation values, temperature, oxygen saturation and pulse. This continous values are visualized for the users as graphs so they quickly get a well structured overview on their data. A voice assistant interacts with the users and enables them to put in their vitals by voice. In addition, a web interface allows not only to look into ones own data but also to edit health data manually, this ensures that in case that users encounter difficulties with their voice assistants they are still able to record their health data. Furthermore VAP serves medical professionals and paramedics as source of information. A QR-Code enables uncomplicated and quick access to the patients health data and informs the medical staff about their patients health condition.
Voice Assisted Patients combines both, reduction of complexity of health data recording by introducing a voice assistant that assists users to keep control of their health data, and providing easy and fast access to patients health data for medical professionals. VAP will help people to comply with the medical measures that are required. Furthermore, Voice Asssited Patients will lead to more complete data on the user’s health journey, which is especially beneficial for health care professionals who are able to read out the health data record of the users by scanning their QR-code. Because of these features using VAP saves time in emergency situations as well as in normal hospital settings hence it supports health care professionals doing their great job faster!
Evaluation
To evaluate the VAP project, a quantitative analysis was carried out using a questionnaire based on the System Usability Scale, a 5-point Likert scale. Test subjects were selected from healthcare or emergency services professionals, as they can judge the value and quality of the application in terms of its practicality, and were recruited from the team members’ environment. To ensure that all areas of the app were utilised, a test guide was created which contained various tasks with time limits and solution instructions for the test subjects. The test subjects completed the tasks and were then asked for individual feedback. Once the test subjects had completed all the tasks, they were asked to complete the questionnaire.
A positive result could be an increase in data integrity, an improvement in patient compliance motivation and acceptance by healthcare and rescue personnel. This would speak in favour of the use of VAP in both the healthcare and emergency services.
A project at the St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences
Master Program Digital Healthcare
Project Coach: FH-Prof. Andreas Jakl, MSc
Team members:
- Julia Böck
- Tobias Eder
- Theresa Hillebrand
- Patrick Kramml
- Marco Sonnberger
