ApplTree
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Investigating the efficacy, usability and user experience of decision tree programming smartphone app adaptation for people with acquired brain injury
IRAS ID
166561
Contact name
Matthew Jamieson
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Glasgow
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 9 months, 0 days
Research summary
People with acquired brain injury (ABI) often have difficulty with memory during everyday tasks. Research has shown that smartphone reminder applications can help people compensate for impaired memory (Svoboda et al., 2012). However there is still little use of assistive technology by people with ABI and, for smartphone software, an important barrier may be the usability and accessibility of the smartphone interface.
A recent study investigated the Google Calendar app and aimed to understand the smartphone usability issues for people with ABI. It was found that attention difficulties were common and that because Google Calendar had several pieces of information on each screen it was not appropriate for people with ABI.
One solution to this problem would be to create a reminder app in which each screen only has one piece of information and asks the users 'one thing t a time' (e.g. type the event name or select time of event). While this kind of design may be helpful in reducing demands on attention during each screen, it has the disadvantage of increasing the number of screens to navigate through in order to set a reminder. A further solution could be to reduce the number of screens by having decision tree programming built into the app. The app takes the user’s previous selections into account and only displays screens which are relevant.
This study aims to evaluate standard reminder software (Google Calendar), and reminder software with ‘one thing at a time’ and ‘decision tree’ programming to find out a) which leads to more comprehensible reminders being set by people with ABI and b) which are more usable / acceptable for people with ABI. Participants will also be asked to give their quantitative and qualitative feedback about the design of the software to inform future development of this intervention.REC name
West of Scotland REC 3
REC reference
15/WS/0064
Date of REC Opinion
10 Apr 2015
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion