BMAT Technology & Digital Applications 5 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: Which principle in user-centered design for health apps states that error messages should offer a constructive path forward rather than just describing the failure?
- Visibility of system status
- Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors (Correct answer)
- Aesthetic and minimalist design
- Consistency and standards
Correct answer: Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
Nielsen's heuristic on error recovery requires messages that clearly explain the problem and suggest corrective action, not merely report an error code.
Question 2: Natural Language Processing (NLP) applied to clinical notes most directly enables:
- Real-time surgical guidance
- Automated extraction of structured diagnoses from free-text records (Correct answer)
- Medical image segmentation
- Drug compound synthesis prediction
Correct answer: Automated extraction of structured diagnoses from free-text records
NLP algorithms parse unstructured clinical text to identify and extract coded clinical concepts such as diagnoses, medications, and procedures.
Question 3: In a randomized controlled trial evaluating a new digital health intervention, 'blinding' of outcome assessors is important to prevent:
- Selection bias in participant enrollment
- Observer bias affecting outcome measurement (Correct answer)
- Attrition bias from dropouts
- Confounding by indication
Correct answer: Observer bias affecting outcome measurement
If outcome assessors know which group participants are in, their scoring can be unconsciously influenced, introducing observer bias into results.
Question 4: Which network topology connects every device directly to every other device, providing maximum redundancy but becoming impractical at large scale?
- Star topology
- Bus topology
- Mesh topology (Correct answer)
- Ring topology
Correct answer: Mesh topology
A full mesh network connects each node to all others, creating n(n-1)/2 links and maximizing fault tolerance but growing combinatorially with node count.
Question 5: A hospital computes the sensitivity of its sepsis alert system and finds it to be 0.65. This means the system:
- Correctly identifies 65% of patients who do not have sepsis
- Correctly identifies 65% of patients who actually have sepsis (Correct answer)
- Triggers a false alarm in 65% of cases
- Has an overall accuracy of 65%
Correct answer: Correctly identifies 65% of patients who actually have sepsis
Sensitivity of 0.65 means the system detects 65% of true sepsis cases (TP rate), missing 35% of actual sepsis patients (false negatives).
Question 6: The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) refers to:
- A single hospital intranet connecting EHR terminals
- A network of internet-connected medical devices and sensors that collect and transmit health data (Correct answer)
- Software platforms for scheduling patient appointments online
- Cloud-based pharmaceutical supply chain management
Correct answer: A network of internet-connected medical devices and sensors that collect and transmit health data
IoMT encompasses the ecosystem of connected medical devices—from implantables to wearables—that continuously gather and share patient health data over the internet.
Question 7: Federated learning in healthcare allows AI models to be trained across multiple hospitals without sharing raw patient data by:
- Sending anonymized patient records to a central server
- Sharing only model weight updates rather than the underlying data (Correct answer)
- Aggregating data into a secure data lake before training
- Encrypting datasets and merging them at a trusted third party
Correct answer: Sharing only model weight updates rather than the underlying data
Federated learning trains local models at each site and sends only gradient updates to a central aggregator, so raw patient data never leaves its origin institution.
BMAT Technology & Digital Applications 5
Which principle in user-centered design for health apps states that error messages should offer a constructive path forward rather than just describing the failure?