Lifelines: Visualizing Personal Histories

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Lifelines VisualizingPersonal Histories

• Class overview
• Jen Golbeck
• 04 Feb 02

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Background

• LifeLines Visualizing Personal Histories
• Catherine Plaisant, Ben Shneiderman,Brett
  Milash, Ann Rose, Seth Widoff
• University of Maryland College ParkHuman
  Computer Interaction Lab

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LifeLines Purpose

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

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Appearance
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Purpose

• Should be able to spot
• Trends
• Critical Incidents
• Cause-effect relationships
• Previous actions
• all to get the big picture

• Designed for...
• Medical and Legal professions
• Anyone who must make a decision about an
  individual based on a thorough understanding of
  past events

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Previous Research 1

• TufteThe Visual Display of Quantitative
  Information Graphical Summary of patient
  status, The Lancet, 3448919 (August 6, 1994).
  386-389.

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Tufte, Graphical summary

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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

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Previous Research 2

• Plaisant, ShneidermanScheduling Home Control
  Devices design issues and usability evaluation
  of four touchscreen interfaces. Int. J
  Man-Machine Studies, 26 (1992), 375-393.
• Showed that for scheduling devices in the home,
  timelines are quickly understood and used for
  data entry

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Previous Research 3

• Shneidermanwith JogStarfield displays
  (discussed by Cassie?)with KandoganElastic
  WindowsElastic 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.

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Applications 1

• 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

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Applications 2

• 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

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Interface Design 1

• 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)

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Interface Design 2

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

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Contributions 1

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

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Contributions 2

• Communicating Time-Oriented, Skeletal Plans to
  Domain Experts Lucidly, Proc of the 10th Intl
  Conf on Database and Expert Systems Appliactions
  (DEXA99)

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Strengths and Weaknesses

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