The Effects of Time Delays on a Telepathology User Interface
The Effects of Time Delays on a Telepathology User Interface
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Date
1998-10-15
Authors
Carr, David
Hasegawa, Hiroaki
Lemmon, Doug
Plaisant, Catherine
Advisor
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Abstract
Telepathology enables a pathologist to examine physically distant tissue
samples by microscope operation over a communication link. Communication
links can impose time delays which cause difficulties in controlling the
remote device. Such difficulties were found in a microscope teleoperation
system. Since the user interface is critical to pathologist's acceptance
of telepathology, we redesigned the user interface for this system, built
two different versions (a keypad whose movement commands operated by
specifying a start command followed by a stop command and a trackball
interface whose movement commands were incremental and directly
proportional to the rotation of the trackball). We then conducted a pilot
study to determine the effect of time delays on the new user interfaces.
In our experiment, the keypad was the faster interface when the time delay
is short. There was no evidence to favor either the keypad or trackball
when the time delay was longer. Moving long distances over the microscope
slide by dragging the field-of-view indicator on the touchscreen control
panel improved inexperienced user performance. Also, the experiment
suggests that changes could be made to improve the trackball interface.
(Also cross-referenced as CAR-TR-616)
(Also cross-referenced as SRC-TR-92-49)