Design and Evaluation of Content-Orientation Techniques for Medical Applications using Multi-Touch Tabletop Displays

Advancement in Human-Computer Interaction provides a natural type of multi-touch interaction. It encouraged designers and researchers to proceed towards the Natural User Interface (NUI). Such interfaces reduce the barriers to computing while increasing the power of intuitiveness of users. A tabletop display provides a NUI for working and leisure based applications such as gaming, education, museums, restaurants, medical, homes and offices. The medical domain is important that involves the diagnosing and monitoring of medical contents and is considered as a highly significant in term of patients’ health. A tabletop display provides high visualization of information, co-located collaboration, direct and natural interaction, and simultaneous multi-user multi-touch interaction to select and manipulate the digital contents. These digital contents require appropriate orientation on the workspace to perform co-located collaborative tasks. To accomplish such an orientation, some techniques are discovered but the absence of orientation technique is observed in the medical domain. Lack of such technique decreases visibility, accessibility, readability and loss of control over the digital contents during the collaborative interaction. As a result, it affects the overall usability of tabletop displays during multi-user multi-touch interaction. This study attempts to identify the user’s requirements for content-orientation for planning the diagnosing and monitoring of medical contents. For this reason, a conceptual framework is developed for designing the content-orientation for planning diagnosing and monitoring of medical contents. Afterward, the content-orientation techniques are designed and developed for the NUI with existing designs of manual-reorientation and global-reorientation, and proposed designs of control-reorientation and hybrid-reorientation. A within-group experiment method is used and the medical doctors take part as the representative participants. The orientation designs facilitate them to perform appropriate orientation of the medical contents in co-located collaborative environment.