Preferences of handwriting recognition on mobile information systems in medicine: Improving handwriting algorithm on the basis of real-life usability research

Streamlining data acquisition in mobile health care in order to increase accuracy and efficiency can only benefit the patient. The company FERK-Systems has been providing health care information systems for various German medical services for many years. The design and development of a compatible front-end system for handwriting recognition, particularly for use in ambulances was clearly needed. While handwriting recognition has been a classical topic of computer science for many years, many problems still need to be solved. In this paper, we report on the study and resulting improvements achieved by the adaptation of an existing handwriting algorithm, based on experiences made during medical rescue missions. By improving accuracy and error correction the performance of an available handwriting recognition algorithm was increased. However, the end user studies showed that the virtual keyboard is still the overall preferred method compared to handwriting, especially among participants with a computer usage of more than 30 hours a week. This is possibly due to the wide availability of the QUERTY/QUERTZ keyboard.