Empirical study of the use of PDA in community medicine

Objectives: This study was to evaluate empirically the potential benefits and limitations of Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) in public health survey. Methods: The original questionnaire was developed to survey the life quality and health status of the elderly aged over 65. The PDA questionnaire was designed using the ThinkDB2.0 mainly because of its support of Chinese codes. The Visor Deluxe PDAs were used in this study. A total of 174 elderly were interviewed. The interviewers who had never used PDAs were organized into nine 2-student squads. All interviewers filled a evaluation form with seven questions concerning the clarity, convenience, constraints, time spent, Chinese Input, English Input, and overall satisfaction of the PDAs after performing all the survey tasks. The qualitative, instead of quantitative, analysis of the results were made due to the small sample size. Results: Forth-three precent (74) of the questionnaires were found to have an average missing value of the 1.7% of questions, which was greater than that using paper questionnaires. Most of the interviewers found the PDA inconvenient. The majority did not find the Chinese Input as easy as the English Input. The average overall satisfactory score was only 66. The top two frequently mentioned negative experiences were "too many but small screens, hard to keep on track" and "lack of flexibility of making notes on special observation." On the other hand, the greatest advantage acknowledged by all interviews with respect to using PDAs was that the questionnaires need not be recoded. Conclusions: The values of PDA in public health survey would depend greatly on how well PDA usage fit in the workflow, rather than its technical specifications. The majority of problems could be solved or improved by a good PDA interface design. The potential benefit of PDA would be its capability of integrating into the entire field of survey management support systems by serving as a front-end mobile data collection tool. However, the real benefits, or disadvantages, of PDA in public health survey can only be understood by the cost-effectiveness analysis.