New Approaches to Collecting Family Health History – A Preliminary Study Investigating the Efficacy of Conversational Systems to Collect Family Health History

Abstract

Knowing and compiling your family health information is an important, cost-effective and efficient way to help your doctor screen and monitor for risks of genomic diseases such as cancer. There are several ways to collect family health history, including the use of digital records. Digital records can be helpful for sharing and updating information among family members. However, minimal research has been conducted to compare the different data collection interfaces. This study focuses on evaluating the user’s performance and preference between a conversational interface that we developed and a traditional interface for compiling family health history. Using a within-subjects design, twenty participants were asked to perform several tasks using both platforms. Although the conversational interface required more clicks, participants reported lower workload, higher performance and greater ease-of-use with this platform, and preferred the guidance of the virtual assistant.

An empirical study investigating the user acceptance of a virtual conversational agent interface for family health history collection among the geriatric population

“…This increased mental demand impacted performance and efficiency as seen from the increased task completion time and number of errors. 67,68…”

“…As confirmed by the qualitative feedback, participants felt the standard interface to be too wordy, thus impacting their cognitive load and supporting their preference for VCA interface. 64,66,70 Guidelines proposed by Stewart and Travis (2002) 68 suggest that effective interfaces are designed by considering the capacity limitation of the users and reducing the short-term memory load. The increase in the cognitive load may affect the user’s satisfaction while completing different tasks.…”

“…This increased mental demand impacted performance and efficiency as seen from the increased task completion time and number of errors. 67,68 Similarly, participants had to read lengthy instructions to complete the fifth task (sharing the information) in the standard interface since it did not have an intuitive workflow. However, the participants did not make more errors than when using the VCA interface, perhaps because they remembered the difficulty they had completing the third task without reading the instructions.…”

“…The increase in the cognitive load may affect the user's satisfaction while completing different tasks. 68 Schmutz et al (2009) 69 demonstrated the NASA-TLX scale to be an important measure of this cognitive load. In this study, participants reported higher workload scores using the standard interface than the VCA interface, results mirrored by the lower values on the technology acceptance and usability metrics.…”

Designing and Evaluating a Digital Family Health History Tool for Spanish Speakers

“…VICKY 1.0 was shown to have good acceptability and feasibility among English speaking patients at a safety-net hospital [18]. Others have similarly shown that conversational systems are more usable compared to traditional interfaces for compiling family health histories [19]. Currently, VICKY 2.0 is undergoing a randomized controlled trial to determine its accuracy in collecting health history information compared to another publicly available digital tool (My Family Health Portrait, https://phgkb.cdc.gov/FHH).…”