Date of Award

2012

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Systems Engineering

First Advisor

Jiang, Steven

Abstract

Emergency departments collect large amounts of data to make decisions regarding patient care. New technologies are used to support the decision-making process. Various information visualization (IV) techniques can be used to support healthcare professionals in visualizing patterns that can be helpful in the decision-making process. Implementation of decision support tools with IV techniques in EDIS is difficult to achieve and thus an evaluation of the techniques is needed. The purpose of this dissertation is to propose an evaluation framework to assess various IV techniques in EDIS and provide recommendations for developers. A comprehensive assessment framework was developed based on performance measures, user opinion, mental workload, and eye tracking metrics to evaluate IV techniques for EDIS. A heuristic evaluation, an empirical study, focus groups, and a usability test with domain experts were conducted to demonstrate the potential of utilizing this methodology. A significant difference in performance, usability, mental workload, and eye tracking metrics was found for the visualization techniques as applied to EDIS. The findings of these studies suggest that when applied to an EDIS the density chart, tree map, and network diagrams have lower performance times, better accuracy, higher usability opinion, and lower mental workload than the 3D scatter plot, scatter plot matrix, and parallel coordinates. From these results, a set of guidelines is recommended for designers of EDIS that employ the use of visualization techniques. Future work includes further use of this assessment framework to develop a model for IV effectiveness and its application to other complex systems.

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