Innovating Walking Speed as a Vital Sign: An Interface Development and Usability Study

Measuring walking speed is becoming a more useful tool for assessing overall patient health along with the other five vital signs: temperature, blood pressure, pulse, respiratory rate, and pain. Clinicians consider walking speed to be the “sixth vital sign”. Standardization in measuring walking speed remains elusive and current methods may lead to inconsistent and inaccurate results. This study focused on testing an interface prototype that provides the user with a record-based platform for analyzing walking speed. Two usability studies were conducted with two separate iterations of interfaces. This paper focuses on the second interface, which was a refined version of the first interface. Data obtained through usability metrics and verbal protocol analyses (VPAs) was analyzed. Results from this study provided suggestions for improving the second interface’s ease of use and overall task interaction. Future work will address improving the interface prototype and converting it to a fully-programmed version.