Electronic Data Capture for Injury and Illness Surveillance : A usability study

Sammanfattning: Despite the development of injury surveillance systems for use at large multi sportsevents (Junge 2008), their implementation is still methodologically and practicallychallenging. Edouard (2013) and Engebretsen (2013) have pointed out that thecontext of athletics championships feature unique constraints, such as a limiteddata-collection window and large amounts of data to be recorded and rapidlyvalidated. To manage these logistical issues, Electronic Data Capture (EDC) methodshave been proposed (Bjorneboe 2009, Alonso 2012, Edouard 2013). EDC systemshave successfully been used for surveillance during multi-sport events Derman et al(2013) and its potential for surveillance studies during athletics championships istherefore interesting. The focus for surveillance during athletics championships hasthis far been on injury and illness data collected from team medical staff in directassociation to the competitions. But the most common injury and illness problems inathletics are overuse syndromes (Alonso 2009, Edouard 2012, Jacobsson 2013) andknowledge of risk factors associated to these problems is also relevant in associationto championships. A desirable next step to extend the surveillance routines istherefore to include also pre-participation risk factors. For surveillance of overusesyndromes, online systems for athlete self-report of data on pain and othersymptoms have been reported superior to reports from coaches (Shiff 2010). EDCsystems have also been applied for athlete self-report of exposure and injury data inathletics and other individual sports and have been found to be well accepted with agood efficiency (Jacobsson 2013, Clarsen 2013). There are thus reasons forinvestigating EDC system use by both athletes and team medical staff during athleticchampionships.This thesis used a cross-sectional design to collect qualitative data from athletes andteam medical staff using interviews and “think-aloud” usability evaluation methods(Ericsson 1993; Kuusela 2000). It was performed over 3 days during the 2013European Athletics Indoor Championships in Gothenburg, Sweden. Online EDCsystems for collection of data from athletes and team medical staff, respectively,were prepared for the study. The system for use by team medical staff was intendedto collect data on injuries and illnesses sustained during the championship and thesystem for athletes to collect data on risk factors.This study does not provide a solution in how an EDC effort should be implementedduring athletics championships. It does however points towards usability factorsthat needs to be taken into consideration if taking such an approach.