Task-Data Taxonomy for Health Data Visualizations : Web-Based Survey With Experts and Older Adults

Background: Increasingly, eHealth involves health data visualizations to enable users to better understand their health situation. Selecting efficient and ergonomic visualizations requires knowledge about the task that the user wants to carry out and the type of data to be displayed. Taxonomies of abstract tasks and data types bundle this knowledge in a general manner. Task-data taxonomies exist for visualization tasks and data. They also exist for eHealth tasks. However, there is currently no joint task taxonomy available for health data visualizations incorporating the perspective of the prospective users. One of the most prominent prospective user groups of eHealth are older adults, but their perspective is rarely considered when constructing tasks lists. Objective: The aim of this study was to construct a task-data taxonomy for health data visualizations based on the opinion of older adults as prospective users of eHealth systems. eHealth experts served as a control group against the bias of lacking background knowledge. The resulting taxonomy would then be used as an orientation in system requirement analysis and empirical evaluation and to facilitate a common understanding and language in eHealth data visualization. Methods: Answers from 98 participants (51 older adults and 47 eHealth experts) given in an online survey were quantitatively analyzed, compared between groups, and synthesized into a task-data taxonomy for health data visualizations. Results: Consultation, diagnosis, mentoring, and monitoring were confirmed as relevant abstract tasks in eHealth. Experts and older adults disagreed on the importance of mentoring (χ24=14.1, P=.002) and monitoring (χ24=22.1, P<.001). The answers to the open questions validated the findings from the closed questions and added therapy, communication, cooperation, and quality management to the aforementioned tasks. Here, group differences in normalized code counts were identified for “monitoring” between the expert group (mean 0.18, SD 0.23) and the group of older adults (mean 0.08, SD 0.15; t96=2431, P=.02). Time-dependent data was most relevant across all eHealth tasks. Finally, visualization tasks and data types were assigned to eHealth tasks by both experimental groups. Conclusions: We empirically developed a task-data taxonomy for health data visualizations with prospective users. This provides a general framework for theoretical concession and for the prioritization of user-centered system design and evaluation. At the same time, the functionality dimension of the taxonomy for telemedicine—chosen as the basis for the construction of present taxonomy—was confirmed. [JMIR Med Inform 2018;6(3):e39]