Introduction The search for new ways to optimize the use of medications by patients has led the pharmaceutical community to promote the idea of introducing pictograms into routine practice. The main intention of pictograms is to ease patient adherence and to reduce potential risks or errors associated with the use of medications. Purpose To evaluate a series of pharmaceutical pictograms for p...

Taking a canonical perspective of an object provides rich information about its 3D structure. Furthermore, this detail has been suggested to enhance cognitive processing of the object. Following this logic, the pictogram, a descriptive symbol used to illustrate information, should be designed in 3D form. However, pictograms must also be designed simply, without shading or fine lines, in order t...

BACKGROUND Communicating health-related instructions with pictograms is useful, but such graphics can be interpreted in different ways. It is crucial to understand which pictogram components are best for accurate communication. OBJECTIVES To catalogue pictograms used to label drugs in clinical practice; to identify the common graphic elements for defined categories of pictograms, by performin...

Ambient lighting conditions, under which the packaging is viewed, determine to a large extent the visual perception of the information which it carries. This paper investigated how different illuminants affect the legibility of pictograms intended for the application on different coloured packaging. 87 participants observed the pictograms on blue, red and yellow coloured backgrounds in a viewin...

An inability to read and understand written medication instructions may be a major contributory factor to non-compliance in certain patient populations, particularly in countries with a high illiteracy rate such as South Africa. Twenty three pictograms from the USP-DI and a corresponding set of 23 locally developed, culturally sensitive pictograms for conveying medication instructions were eval...

One of the sources of poor health outcomes is the lack of compliance with the prescribed treatment plans, often due to communication barriers between healthcare professionals and patients. Pictograms are a form of communication that conveys meaning through its pictorial resemblance to a physical object or an action. Pharmaceutical pictograms are often associated with a better comprehension of t...

Recent proposals for privacy pictograms show a growing interest of simplifying privacy-related statements. Such pictograms can be useful to enhance the users’ understanding of privacy issues and empower to react accordingly. In this text we bring together various mostly independently developed approaches and compare them with each other. We distinguish different categories, e.g., pictograms for...

Pharmaceutical pictograms have the potential to play an important role in optimizing compliance in the illiterate patient population. Pictograms may improve warning comprehension for those with visual or literacy difficulties and can sometimes be recognized and recalled far better than words. The main purpose of this study is to determine whether these pictograms can be effectively understood b...

To retrieve pictograms having semantically ambiguous interpretations, we propose a semantic relevance measure which uses pictogram interpretation words collected from a web survey. The proposed measure uses ratio and similarity information contained in a set of pictogram interpretation words to (1) retrieve pictograms having implicit meaning but not explicit interpretation word and (2) rank pic...

BACKGROUND Conveying information to patients on how to use medications at the dispensing sessions and retention of this information by the patients is essential to the good pharmaceutical care. The aim of our study was to examine the comprehensibility of the selected three potentially usable pictograms by five groups of subjects who had different levels of literacy in both before and after mini...