Development of a computer-based interviewing tool to enhance the requirements gathering process

Software design is an area where it is most important to elicit an accurate and complete set of requirements. Determining the users requirements and their qualitative satisfaction with a developing product are two major problems which arise, often due to the different backgrounds and perspectives of the different stakeholders, including the software engineer, the domain expert and the end-user. Involving users throughout the design and development process is an essential part of any project. Computer-based interviewing has been found to be a valuable tool in eliciting information, which can also enhance interpersonal communication afterwards. This paper discusses the development of a computer interviewing tool to facilitate the gathering of user requirements and conducting user evaluations.     

A quarter-century of computer-based medical records

Early developments and subsequent progress in the area of computer-based medical records are reviewed. The current state of the art and the level of penetration through the healthcare system are much less than the first decade's advances pointed towards. Possible explanations are explored.     

A computer-based outpatient medical record for a teaching hospital.

We developed a computer-based outpatient medical record system to facilitate direct physician interaction with the clinical computing system at the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. During the 2 years since the medical record system was installed, 20 staff physicians, 5 fellows, 64 residents, and 11 nurse practitioners have entered 15,121 active problems and 1996 inactive problems for 3524 patients, as well as 12,651 active medications and 1894 discontinued medications for 3430 patients. Another 20,321 items were entered on health-promotion and disease-prevention screening sheets, and with the help of automatic updating by the computer, an additional 21,897 entries on screening sheets were made for 8686 patients. Clinicians wrote 10.9 +/- 12.8 (mean +/- SD) words per problem when they were working at the computer, as compared with 4.3 +/- 2.5 words per problem when they were writing in the paper medical record. We conclude that physicians will readily enter data directly into a computing system when they are given appropriate tools, and that they consider the computer-based problem list to be a valuable improvement over its paper counterpart. Use of a computer-based medical record system has obvious benefits for data management and patient care.     

Relation between age, education, and time to respond to questions in a computer-based medical interview

The time required for 458 women volunteers to respond to questions in a computer-based medical interview was related both to their age and to their formal education. When the analysis was restricted to the 220 women with a college degree, older women responded more slowly than their younger counterparts, and when the analysis was restricted to the 265 women between 18 and 30 years of age, women with less formal education took longer to respond. By contrast, the time required for the volunteers to record their responses was related only to age.     

Distinguishing drug toxicity syndromes from medical diseases: a QMR computer-based approach.

Drug effects can mimic a wide variety of diseases. Experts note that adverse drug reactions (ADRs) have become the 'greatest imitator' of disease in clinical medicine. Quick Medical Reference (QMR) is a decision support system providing diagnostic data about more than 600 medical diseases. Currently, QMR contains only limited drug information. Just as physicians have difficulty diagnosing ADRs, QMR has similar problems in differentiating natural disease manifestations from drug toxicity syndromes. To remedy this problem, two prototype Drug Syndromes (DS), Carbamazepine Toxicity and Penicillin Toxicity, were incorporated into the QMR Knowledge Base (KB). Using detailed case reports, we demonstrated that a DS-augmented version of QMR was successful in discriminating these DS from the other diseases in QMR's KB. The addition of DS significantly improves QMR's diagnostic performance in cases in which some of the pathologic features are the consequence of drugs.     

Conducting a matched-pairs historical cohort study with a computer-based ambulatory medical record system

We describe techniques for using the Computer-Stored Ambulatory Record (COSTAR) at the Massachusetts General Hospital to conduct a historical cohort study of the effect of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) on blood pressure control. A query language was used to identify patients satisfying clinical and data-availability criteria, to match these patients with clinically similar patients not exposed to NSAIDs, and to collect data from the COSTAR records of both groups of patients to determine any differences in outcome. We analyzed over 30,000 patient records to select 90 pairs of patients used in the study. This approach to clinical research uses data collected for purpose of patient care and so does not require the separate recording of patient data for clinical research. Using computer-based medical record systems with a query language allows selection and matching of patients using detailed demographic and clinical criteria. The ability to conduct such studies is an advantage of computer-based medical record systems over the paper record system.     

Using learning styles to evaluate computer-based instruction

This study compared two instruments while evaluating the effects of learning style on performance when using a computer-based instruction (CBI) system to teach introductory probability and statistics. The Gregorc Style Delineator (GSD) and the Kolb Learning Style Inventory (LSI) were used to measure learning style. Results indicated that there was an effect of learning style when using the GSD: students identified as Concrete Sequential learned significantly less than students identified as Concrete Random. There was no effect according to LSI styles. Lack of an ordering preference dimension in the LSI is discussed as a possible explanation. Findings from other studies evaluating CBI and recommendations are also discussed.     

Student-teacher communication directed to computer-based learning environments

The main objective of this paper is to provide an optimal way for students to control a computer-based teacher and interact with it. From previous experience, we took a special interest in improving the navigation through tutorial systems, and also in the evaluation techniques, designing and developing a new tutorial based on an open architecture. After implementing the tutorial prototype, it was evaluated by a selected group of users in a controlled laboratory situation in order to gather data about the characteristics and usability of this prototype. In general, users had a good overall opinion of the evaluated tutorial. The key idea behind our experience is the introduction of tutorials in all practical classes as a complement to the instructor in the near future.     

The contribution of computer-based activities to understanding statistics

Psychology students often find statistical concepts difficult, and research has suggested that students can hold confusions about seemingly straightforward concepts, such as the mean. Although previous research has evaluated computer-based learning systems for statistics, there is little research that has looked specifically at whether particular computer-based learner activities contribute to students' understanding of introductory concepts in statistics. The study described in this paper was designed to investigate whether computer-based activities that provide multiple representations of concepts contribute to students' understanding of correlations and measures of central tendency. A pre-/post-test control group design was used involving 50 students who were studying psychology. It was found that activities involving the direct manipulation of data contributed to students' understanding of measures of central tendency as indicated by a significant improvement from pre- to post-test. However, findings indicated that computer-based activities of this kind did not necessarily contribute to students' understanding of correlations.     

CAPS: a computer-based aid to aircraft project studies

CAPS (Computer Aided Project Study) is a computer based system which has been developed to assist engineers and designers engaged in aircraft project studies. It has a modular organization encompassing a wide range of topics including mass, aerodynamics, performance and cost estimation.The data flow and module execution is controlled by the PROTRAN system which has been specially developed for CAPS but has other potential applications. Jobs are specified in simple statements using the PROTRAN language. People without programming knowledge rapidly become proficient in its use, but Fortran programmers can use all their experience since it is an extension of that language.This paper describes the development of CAPS and is illustrated by some practical examples. The main features of the PROTRAN system are also presented.     

Measures of retaining digital evidence to prosecute computer-based cyber-crimes

With the rapid growth of computer and network systems in recent years, there has also been a corresponding increase in cyber-crime. Cyber-crime takes many forms and has garnered much attention in the media, making information security a more urgent and important priority. In order to fight cyber-crime, criminal evidence must be gathered from these computer-based systems. This is quite different from the collection of conventional criminal evidence and can confuse investigators attempting to deal with the forensics of cyber-crime, highlighting the importance of computer forensics. In this paper, we offer solutions to guard against cyber-crime through the implementation of software toolkits for computer-based systems. In this way, those who engage in criminal acts in cyber-space can be more easily apprehended.     

Age differences in reactions to errors in computer-based work

The present study examined the reactions of older and younger workers to the situation of encountering an error during computer-based work. It was expected that older workers would have a stronger negative emotional reaction to such an error due to a combination of age-related factors. In both a questionnaire and an observational study among 134 office workers this was found to be the case. This age relationship remained after controlling for differences in computer experience, attitudes to new technology, education and the number of errors made by participants during a typical computer-based work session. More detailed analyses showed that in response to an error situation, older workers compared to younger ones stated they were significantly less likely to try and solve the problem entirely on their own; this was also partly supported by the observational data. In terms of the available options for helping rectify errors, older workers reported that they were more often likely to use written documentation and rely less on asking other workers. The implications of the findings are discussed in terms of interventions to ameliorate the impact of errors in computer-based work on an older workforce.