Health Electronic Record Monitoring Tool (HERMT)
A general purpose web monitoring tool

1. Purpose

HERMT is a tool to monitor user interaction with a web application. It is a general purpose tool that can be used with any web application, such as Electronic Health Records systems. The current version of HERMT provides the following measurements:

• Time spent by a user on a page, including the idle time
• List of all pages seen by a user
• Name and IP address of the user
• Data updates on a web form (e.g. update of a value in a text field)
• Export files of measurements for further analysis (formats are Excel and XML)

2. How HERMT works?

HERMT is based on a plug-in program for a web browser. Such a plug-in program has access to internal events of the browser. We used internal browser events to develop the tool. Technically speaking, the browser plug-in is a Dynamic Load Library (DLL) file associated with a browser instance.

DLL file services capture browser events and then notify the windows-based application (i.e. HERMT) by sending messages depending on the event captured. HERMT, the windows-based application, collects all event messages and processes these to get pertinent measurements. Processing proceeds on all event messages when event monitoring stops.

3. Installation

Follow these instructions to install HERMT:

• Download the file hermt.zip
• Unzip the content in a folder of your choice (e.g. C:\HERMT)
• Run setup.bat
• Answer "Yes" to the dialog box (It will add some entries in the registry database)

Installation is complete. You can follow this tutorial to see how to use HERMT.

4. System requirements

The tool has been tested on Windows 2000 and Windows XP. HERMT is compatible with Internet Explorer 4.0 or later.

5. Troubleshooting

HERMT needs DLL file to work properly. If you have an error like "Unable To Locate DLL", you can download the libraries and unzip them in HERMT folder (e.g. C:\HERMT).

6. Configuration

The file "config.txt" is used to set the value in second of the minimum of time that a user can leave its computer with no activity before it is considered as idle time.

HERMT | Tutorial