Abstract
Patient Information Leaflets accompanying medicine are heavily regulated by European and individual national legislation in the way they need to be designed, written, and produced. Further, the design of these leaflets is still firmly anchored in a printed document-based paradigm. This means that transposing them for use by mobile devices, such as smart phones or tablets is a process that is not well understood. This paper shows how Information Designers can offer insights to a problem that will become increasingly prevalent, as the demands on the ‘message’ surpass the medium of the paper-based document and seek to harvest the potential of mobile devices to offer hypertext, multimedia and tailored information. This paper investigates the problem via a case study examining pain relieving (Fentanyl) transdermal patches and offers some lessons learnt from this experience, in order to open up and shed light on this emerging aspect of information design practice.
Keywords
information design, patient information leaflets, mobile devices
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2016.326
Citation
Koumoundourou, M., Koutsabasis, P., and Darzentas, J. (2016) Informing the design of mobile device-based patient instructions leaflets: the case of Fentanyl patches, in Lloyd, P. and Bohemia, E. (eds.), Future Focused Thinking - DRS International Conference 2016, 27 - 30 June, Brighton, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2016.326
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Informing the design of mobile device-based patient instructions leaflets: the case of Fentanyl patches
Patient Information Leaflets accompanying medicine are heavily regulated by European and individual national legislation in the way they need to be designed, written, and produced. Further, the design of these leaflets is still firmly anchored in a printed document-based paradigm. This means that transposing them for use by mobile devices, such as smart phones or tablets is a process that is not well understood. This paper shows how Information Designers can offer insights to a problem that will become increasingly prevalent, as the demands on the ‘message’ surpass the medium of the paper-based document and seek to harvest the potential of mobile devices to offer hypertext, multimedia and tailored information. This paper investigates the problem via a case study examining pain relieving (Fentanyl) transdermal patches and offers some lessons learnt from this experience, in order to open up and shed light on this emerging aspect of information design practice.