Development and Testing of a Usability Checklist for the Evaluation of Control Interfaces of Electrical Medical Beds

The last few decades have seen the hospital environment become more and more technologically advanced with the development of advanced diagnostic and surgical tools. The beds have also undergone a radical transformation, thanks to the integration of electrical and electronic components, that have allowed the birth of the modern widespread electric beds. This work presents a checklist developed to test the usability of the pushbutton panels that control their movements, which could be useful in designing a controller capable of considering the needs of users such as caregivers and patients. The checklist items were created starting from the usability guidelines and then placed within an appropriate Nielsen heuristic. The tool thus designed was tested in a usability expert evaluation session with five experts. The data collected were the responses to the checklist, the experts' comments, the notes collected during the procedure, the time to complete, and the severity and frequency of the problems detected. The results showed that the checklist could detect a substantial series of significant usability problems in a short time, which makes it an easily usable tool in the industrial field for rapid and valuable tests for future interfaces design. The usage of this developed checklist could be useful to design better control panels to facilitate both caregivers' work and patients' stay.