How medical expertise influences the understanding of symptom intensities - a fuzzy approach

Authors:
Franziska Bocklisch;Maria Stephan;Barbara Wulfken;Steffen F. Bocklisch;Josef F. Krems
Affiliations:
Cognitive and Engineering Psychology, Chemnitz University of Technology, Chemnitz, Germany;Cognitive and Engineering Psychology, Chemnitz University of Technology, Chemnitz, Germany;Cognitive and Engineering Psychology, Chemnitz University of Technology, Chemnitz, Germany;Systems Theory, Chemnitz University of Technology, Chemnitz, Germany;Cognitive and Engineering Psychology, Chemnitz University of Technology, Chemnitz, Germany
Venue:
USAB'11 Proceedings of the 7th conference on Workgroup Human-Computer Interaction and Usability Engineering of the Austrian Computer Society: information Quality in e-Health
Year:
2011

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Abstract

This paper examines the role of imprecision in the interpretation of verbal symptom intensities (e.g., high fever) depending on the level of medical expertise. In a contrastive study we compare low, medium and high level experts (medical students vs. physicians with M = 5.3 vs. M = 24.9 years of experience) concerning their interpretation of symptom intensities. For obtaining and modeling of empirical data a fuzzy approach was used. The resulting fuzzy membership functions (MF) reflect the meanings of the verbal symptom intensities. The two main findings are: (1) with increasing expertise the precision of the MF increase such that low level experts have very vague concepts compared to high level experts and (2) the precision depends on the symptom (e.g., intensities of fever are more precise than pain intensities).