Lifelines: Visualizing Personal Histories Class overview Jen Golbeck 04 Feb 02

Background t LifeLines: Visualizing Personal Histories t Catherine Plaisant, Ben Shneiderman, Brett Milash, Ann Rose, Seth Widoff t University of Maryland College Park Human Computer Interaction Lab

LifeLines: Purpose t Purpose: Visualize information about a person over time in one screen t Show overview with access to details about each item t Provide quick access to important data which would otherwise need to be hand sorted

Appearance

Purpose Designed for... t Medical and Legal professions t Anyone “who must make a decision about an individual based on a thorough understanding of past events” Should be able to spot… t Trends t Critical Incidents t Cause-effect relationships t Previous actions …all to get the “big picture”

Previous Research 1 t Tufte The Visual Display of Quantitative Information “Graphical Summary of patient status”, The Lancet, 344:8919 (August 6, 1994)

Tufte, “Graphical summary…” t Objective: To develop a graphical summary of patient status that overlays the traditional medical record and is designed to facilitate patient care rather than administrative, regulatory, financial, or legal needs. t Design: A richly detailed, one-page summary of patient status suitable for high-resolution computer display or laser printer. All numerical data are plotted using small repeated graphs to help reveal the time course of the patient's illness and response to treatment. Progress notes and stamp-sized medical images are also included. t Methods: All findings and treatments are scaled individually based on reference values, recommended drug dosages, and clinical judgement to allow display on a uniform vertical axis. A non-linear time scale compresses years of data into a context allowing one to assess recent trends. The most recent numerical values are also printed above each graph. All words and numbers are displayed in Bitstream Bell Centennial, a compact and legible typeface. t Results: A sample graphical summary of one particularly long and complex patient illness involving both medical and psychiatric illnesses was created. The data from a 5 cm thick medical record were extracted into a 24 by 484 flowsheet (11,616 cells containing 1786 individual values). These data were graphically summarized and displayed legibly on a single page. t Conclusion: The graphical summary of patient status maps findings and treatments over time. The high-resolution display allows the clinician to 1) assess relationships between findings and treatments and 2) consider alternative diagnostic and management strategies. The graphical summary illustrates how clinicians' needs for accessible and interpretable patient information can be met from an electronic medical record designed to meet legal and administrative needs. t Comments: Intuitively, it would seem that a one page graphical summary of an entire medical chart would be immensely useful. This must be subjected to rigorous scientific evaluation to see

Previous Research 2 t Plaisant, Shneiderman “Scheduling Home Control Devices: design issues and usability evaluation of four touchscreen interfaces.” Int. J Man- Machine Studies, 26 (1992), t Showed that for scheduling devices in the home, timelines are quickly understood and used for data entry

Previous Research 3 t Shneiderman with Jog: Starfield displays (discussed by Cassie?) with Kandogan: Elastic Windows Elastic windows, with improved spatial layout and rapid multi-window operations, are an effective alternative to current window management strategies for efficient personal role management]. Multi-window operations are achieved by issuing operations on window groups hierarchically organized in a space-filling tiled layout.

Applications 1 t Juvenile Justice Youth Record –Provide information to case workers about youthful offenders –Current status and case history –Improve current system which uses many screens and cryptic codes

Applications 2 t Medical Records –Provide a one screen overview with details on demand of patient history –Show conditions, treatments, allergies, and history –Improve speed of knowledge acquisition over current visit-by-visit records which are not connected, may be missing information, and do not show connections

Interface Design 1 t Show data in timeline format –Encode information using color and icons –Highlight relationships between periods –Use graphical information to indicate magnitude (ie thickness of line to indicate severity of offense; shade of color to indicate severity of illness)

Interface Design 2 Allow user to… t Focus on or zoom to any period or event t Collapse or expand categories of information (i.e. diagnoses, medication, hospitalizations) - elastic windows t Show further details for any item

Contributions 1 t Information Architecture (1998) –Create links –Map data attributes to visual attributes t LifeLines vs Tabular and Graphical –Show that LifeLines facilitates faster analysis of data than other forms

Contributions 2 t Communicating Time-Oriented, Skeletal Plans to Domain Experts Lucidly, Proc of the 10th Int’l Conf on Database and Expert Systems Appliactions (DEXA99)

Strengths and Weaknesses t Strength - New, innovative and effective method for visualizing a lot of interrelated and complex information t Weakness - no method for data conversion or input