Can you help us find a better word than “Biometrics”?
Situation:
As you can see in this ticket: [O3-2863] - OpenMRS Issues, the term “Biometrics” in the O3 RefApp is creating some confusion (where we are collecting/displaying Height, Weight, BMI, MUAC, Z-Score, etc):
I do strongly agree that the term “Biometrics” as we currently use it in the O3 RefApp is confusing, and even misleading given that many implementers in our community are proceeding with huge projects to collect “real” biometrics like fingerprints, facial recognition, etc. And two weeks ago I saw an example of a group with a new page section in the O3 Patient Chart called Biometrics where such info is indeed tracked. So I agree we need to change it.
That said: Anthropometrics is a pretty intense word! The general rule in products is to keep text to a 5th/6th-grade level (with the exception of widely-recognized clinical jargon). I believe the real topic in this case is mass or weight. The question we are really trying to answer with this information is “is the patient over/under weight?”
The word needs to work in a general OPD/IPD setting where the patient could be Adult, Geriatric, Pediatric OR Neonatal. (If we were just talking Pediatrics, “Growth” might be an option.)
Ideas:
What do you think?
“Weight”
“Mass”
“Measures”
“Other Measures”
Just as part of “Vitals” is fine
I have another idea that I’ll add as a comment in this thread
Hi @grace the term Anthropometrics suits well but I think that it must be familiarised to our target audience which the patient can be Adult, Geriatric or even Pediatric
What do implementations call these on their existing forms? I’ve always seen them as vitals. Even going to a clinic, when a nurse says “Let me get your vitals” it’s understood that could include temperature, blood pressure, weight, oximetry, etc. But I realize my experience may be US-centric.
When people are getting triaged and these vitals collected in clinics within Kenya, Uganda, Haiti, Nigeria, etc., what does the nurse say to the patient? “Now let me get your anthropometrics?”
If there’s another common term familiar to the majority of providers worldwide, let’s use it. Otherwise, just call them all vitals. If you look at FHIR’s Observation, it’s the first example:
We have to think in pov of the client’s side. Whether they are familiar with anthropometrics terminology. Could be easy for them if it is called measures or a similar kind of that. It’s my opinion.
I’ve also always called these things “vitals” in the contexts I’ve worked in. It looks like the terminology of biometrics was introduced in this PR, matching the designs of that era, which is from before our shift to Carbon. My best guess is that it was hard to layout a single table with eight columns, so we ended up with subpar nomenclature. Maybe the design here could be re-done so that each record spans two lines or something?
even when displayed on one page
Anthropometrics for Weight, Height, BMI, Scores
Vitals for Temp, Bp, SpO2 etc.
Biometrics is reserved for physical characteristics that can ID a client.
When I was translating into Chinese, this word also troubled me for a long time, and I couldn’t find an accurate, clear, and coherent Chinese phrase to represent it.
As a non-native English user, based on the meaning and categorization of these data, I believe it is more appropriate to uniformly refer to them as “vital signs”.
