The practices of scenario observation approach in defining medical tablet PC applications

There are many hospital appliance PCs, Notebooks and PDAs used in clinical but they have several limitations. Tablet PCs combine the advantages and improved disadvantages of these media, but are not widely used in the clinical. 'Scenario observation' is an approach for product development processes. Its basic theorem is 'user-orientated design (UOD)'. During the development process 'visualization' and 'actual experience' methods are employed to guide developers from the user's point of view and scenario to evaluate the maturity and 'completeness' of a product. Therefore the purpose of this study has been to use 'scenario observation' approach to define the design strategy for medical Tablet PC applications. The results of this study indicate that the 'hospitali´zed-placei¨ nurse has more demand than other medical workers. Accordingly, there are 10 proposed design demands concerning medical Tablet PCs. Current medical Tablet PCs do not fully understand or satisfy medical workers' demands therefore using user 'scenario observation' surveys will help to define better design strategies and better medical Tablet PC applications. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.