A fuzzy framework for the usability evaluation of nuclear medical
equipment
C. H. S, Grecco1, I.J.A.L. Santos1, P.V.R.
Carvalho1, M. S. Farias2, C.B. Silva2, L. P.
Farias2
e-mail: [email protected] ,
[email protected], [email protected] ,
[email protected], [email protected],
[email protected].
1
2
Table 1. Ergonomic criteria of usability
SEESC, IEN
SEINS, IEN
Keywords:
usability,
equipment, fuzzy logic.
nuclear
medical
To avoid use errors when handling nuclear
medical equipment, it is important to develop
products with a high degree of usability. This
can be achieved by performing usability
evaluations during the product development
process to detect and mitigate potential usability
problems. Usability evaluation focuses on how
well users can learn and use a product to
achieve their goals. Thus, the usability
evaluation has rapidly become recognized as a
valuable complement to the established
approaches for good user interface design , to
reduce incidents and accidents as well the time
required to learn how to use the equipment. To
gather information about usability, practitioners
use a variety of methods that gather feedback
from users about an existing interface or plans
related to a new interface. A wide range of
usability evaluation methods have been
proposed, but few methods focus on developing
an objective and practical evaluation
framework. Moreover, usability evaluations are
based on human judgments and most methods
cannot fully solve the subjectivity of these
evaluations. In order to remedy this deficiency,
the purpose of this work is to adopt a Fuzzy Set
Theory (FST) approach to establish a
framework for the usability evaluation of
nuclear medical equipment based on heuristics
for user interface design and international
standards for ergonomics of human-system
interaction. The fuzzy framework for usability
evaluation was structured according to the
following steps: (1) Selection of ergonomic
criteria of usability (table 1); (2) Determination
of an ideal usability pattern (figure 1); (3)
Evaluation of the actual usability level
compared with the pattern.
Figure 1. Schematic diagram for determination
of the usability pattern
This evaluation framework can be considered a
proactive tool to assess whether the nuclear
medical equipment under evaluation is efficient
enough and sufficiently satisfactory for the
users. In the future, we intend to use this fuzzy
framework for the usability evaluation of the
Digital Spectrometer ESP 13004. The Digital
Spectrometer ESP 13004 is a very compact
nuclear pulse counting digital system of easy
operation and low power consumption, capable
of assisting mainly the activities related to
nuclear medicine.
The authors gratefully acknowledge the support
of FAPERJ.
References
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22 p. Part 11.
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