Preliminary Findings Regarding the Effect of an Interactive Wall to Promote Hand Hygiene Among Healthcare Workers

摘要

Interactive walls offer promise for behaviour change due to their ability to engage and maintain the attention and interest of users, in a fun and appealing way. This paper presents an interactive wall designed to promote compliance with World Health Organization's hand hygiene guidelines and discusses its acceptance and user experience by healthcare workers. Although hand hygiene is considered the most effective method to prevent healthcare-associated infections, compliance rates with hand hygiene guidelines still remain below recommended levels, raising morbidity, deaths and healthcare costs. Thus, keeping healthcare workers motivated and involved in maintaining best hand hygiene practices is at the heart of this problem. The study was conducted at a Portuguese hospital and pre-and post-intervention data was collected. Preliminary results gathered about risk perceptions, consequences of non-compliance with hand hygiene guidelines and user experience, suggest that a solution like this, which is based on prospective memory and disgust emotions, triggered by visual reminders, easy to learn and use, and involving gesture-based interaction, can be a good approach to complement existing initiatives to improve compliance with hand hygiene guidelines in hospital settings.