Telemedicine Evaluation - Human Factors

The problem of evaluating telemedicine applications has recently been recognized and addressed by both researchers and policy makers. In particular, the DoD Telemedicine Evaluation Working Group (TEWG) has adopted a conceptual framework to guide the development of methodologies to evaluate telemedicine projects in the Department of Defense. One of the five areas the TEWG proposed for evaluation in telemedicine projects is human factors. One aspect of human factors that was determined to be important for evaluation was workload. It is possible that the technological changes proposed in telemedicine systems will increase both behavioral and cognitive workload for health care providers. This additional workload may potentially lead to an increase in the number of errors committed. It is therefore important to be able to accurately assess changes in workload. This document reports work on the development of a methodology for evaluating workload in telemedicine applications. Specifically, the results of a review of the cognitive workload literature are given and details of the empirical testing of candidate workload metrics are reported.