Designing Effective User Interface Experiences for a Self-Service Kiosk to Reduce Emergency Department Crowding

Emergency department crowding has been steadily increasing, with a significant part due to non-emergent pathologies. We developed a self-service kiosk to be used by patients while waiting from triage to treatment room allocation, which collects clinical history, usual medication, main complaint and, also collects vital signs. This information is processed and presented in a comprehensive way to the medical staff in order to accelerate diagnostics and treatment selection. This work describes and analyzes the results of the usability evaluation of this kiosk, taking into account the average time per screen, the average time of a complete kiosk session, the application design and the user interaction with devices and the system. The kiosk was tested in several environments with different types of users, allowing the identification of causes of problems and difficulties experienced, as well as solutions to improve the solution.