Usability, accessibility and inter-operability standards for multimodal mobile healthcare and clinical trials (panel)

Recent advances in mobile technologies are heralding new ways to provide quality patient-care, reducing time-to-bring life-saving drugs to the market and increasing the efficacy of Clinical Trials. Current mobile application trends are geared to reduce wastage and loss of life due to poor compliance. However, the lack of convenient and accessible user interfaces has been limiting the success and wide-scale adoption of these mobile applications. Several standards bodies have taken notice of this fact and the newW3C standards work on multimodal interaction will address the interactivity and accessibility needs of the young and old alike. Recent developments in context-aware user-interfaces and standards that combine touch-tap and speech have made the consumer-class of mobile devices interfaced with other measuring instruments, a viable option for high-quality medical services and are now available for remote patients and urgent cases. The Internet, World Wide Web (WWW), Mobile Devices as a global information infrastructure now offer a low cost environment for telemedicine applications. The new multimodal interfaces improve interaction with these healthcare applications make them ideal for effective collaboration in a natural way through mobile devices. In this session we will present the current standardization effort in this area,discuss the inter-operability of the multimodal healthcare applications and the new trends in health careand monitoring applications. We will also review the best practices for ensuring that these applications meet the usability and accessibility needs of patients and care-givers.