In the wild pilot usability assessment of a connected health system for stroke self management

This paper reports on the findings of a pilot study for the formative "in the wild" assessment of the usability of CONSULT, a research-led connected health system for stroke self-management and prevention. CONSULT integrates data from commercial wellness sensors, electronic health records and clinical guidelines and enables users to monitor their vital signs to support self-monitoring and provision of tailored advice. The CONSULT system includes a dashboard and a chatbot. To assess the usability of our system, six volunteers were recruited to interact with CONSULT over a period of seven days. System logs confirmed that participants interacted with the CONSULT system throughout. CONSULT's ability to integrate data from different sensors was an aspect of this systems that all participants liked and kept them motivated to track their vital signs. The study also revealed several usability issues that designers of this type of systems should consider. Some of the most prevalent issues were: information overload, data misinterpretation, need for more anthropomorphic conversational capabilities for the chatbot; lack of visibility of the data transmission status. This paper concludes with reflections on the importance of these findings when assessing the usability of connected health systems, like CONSULT.