Icons for Displaying Basic Activities of Daily Living Functional status is a key outcome variable for many populations but especially for the elderly, disabled, and impaired. Functional status declines with age and is affected by many other variables, e.g., socioeconomic status, acculturation, etc. minority patients, in particular, are at increased risk for functional limitations because of isolation, living arrangements, education, poverty, and cultural issues. Functional status is a nurse-sensitive outcome measure. As such, nurses need to assess and monitor functional status. Patients are often asked to self-report functional status. However, functional status data are complex, substantial, and multidimensional. Because of this, they are difficult to collect and display efficiently. Icons (pictorial graphic displays) may be an effective solution to presentation of functional status data. Icons can display detailed data along with global data, thus displaying both the parts and the whole simultaneously. Further, pictorial representations of information cross language barriers more universally than text and may also be more understandable for people with low literacy levels. This study represents the initial phase in development of a set of icons for use in displaying functional status. The purpose of the study is to design initial icons for two basic activities of daily living (ADL), bathing and dressing. Both nurses and patients will be asked to draw primitive shapes (glyphs) for a set of fifty functional status items about these two ADLs. Their drawings will then be clustered by shape, and processed by a cluster analysis algorithm, to determine the most representative shape by cluster. Once a dominant shape is discovered for each ADL, a preliminary icon will be designed, proposed and validated. Feedback on the icons designed will be elicited from an expert panel consisting of both nurses and patients.
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