Modern web applications lack in exibility when multiple medical data are shown at the same time. This could bring users to not consider important aspects of their health status and physicians to lose critical patients situations. The "Registro Elettronico Sanitario Personale" (RESP, in English "Personal Sanitary Electronic Registry") is a prototype of a web portal allowing patients and physicians to share health problems, diagnosis, prognosis, pharmaceutical therapies etc. Currently, it presents to patients a static web page. This paper proposes a prototype of a dynamic and fully customizable Graphical User Interface (GUI) for the RESP, in order to provide patients with current and historical medical data, and allow them to analyze their lifestyle. This real-time health monitoring give patients a better awareness on their overall status.
Since the last decade, the Italian Government is tempting the Public
Administration (PA) through a dematerializing process to lower its cost. This involves even
the Health-care System by the adoption of: Electronic Medical Record (EMR),
Patient Health Record (PHR) and Electronic Health Record (EHR) [
The adoption of the electronic medical record rather than the classical one,
is a way to revolutionize people's approach to health [
The RESP is an electronic medical record web portal which allows patient and care-provider from Italy (but in the future maybe all over the world) to meet and share their information or medical problems. It works similarly to a social network where both patient and care-provider can send and receive messages, ask and get diagnosis, and so on. However, di erently from the most known social networks, it lacks in customization on both sides. In this work we underline the importance of a dynamic approach to medical data visualization for the patient.
The current RESP patient's home page shows, on the center, a human image. It shows areas where the patient reported pain in a previous session. An example is shown in Figure 1. On the left side of the screen there is a bar where the patient can nd a xed menu with useful medical utilities (such as patient's diary, diagnoses, personal les, medical therapy etc.). On the top center side of the screen there is a button that allows patient to communicate an issue to his/her care-provider. Finally on the right side are summarized all patient health parameters. The just described view is static and each patient should navigate through the left menu to reach the desired piece of information. Moreover, it is pointless to provide an "always static" image of the patient at the center of the screen. 2
The Proposed Approach
Modern smart-houses have been designed to assist people during their daily
life through many IoT sensors and actuators. Those can be Internet-driven via
smart-phones, Personal Computers or tablets. Nowadays there are plenty of
ZigBee based devices or other commercial solutions such as the Nest [
Each active graph may show a critical section that could warn the patient though a parameter is becoming critical and needs to get lowered.
An example of how the home page gets modi ed is shown in Figure 2. Rather
than show the human image, a dynamic interface with multiple graphs can be
shown (Figure 2 (a)). Users can add the desired graph by clicking on the "Add
new graph" box at the bottom of the page. To delete an undesired graph it
could right click on it and choose the delete option on the contextual menu.
All available graphs could pop-up to the user once the "Add new graph" box
is clicked (Figure 2 (b)). With this approach, each patient can customize its
own home page by adding or deleting custom types of view, showing collected
data from all sensors and devices he/she has. This kind of customization takes
inspiration from the way modern smart-phone Operating Systems allow users
to customize and rearrange icons on the di erent screens. Moreover, with this
interactive approach, every RESP patient can constantly take under control its
health status every time he/she login into the web portal. Unlike the actual
services developed by some major technology companies, such as Microsoft with
HealthVault and Apple with iOS Health, RESP purpose is di erent. While
commercial solutions concentrate on data collection and visualization asking for a
medical support when needed, RESP allows patients and physicians to meet and
share medical records, pharmacological therapies etc. Our approach wants allow
care-providers to keep track in real time the desired patient's health parameter
(or parameters). On patient's side, the visualization of health information may
lead to a self awareness of the lifestyle and the overall health status.
In this work we have proposed a dynamic approach for medical data visualization
and interaction. We have focused the attention on the way multiple data are
stored in the RESP and how they can be visualized by the patients. The User
Interface on both care-provider and patient side can be improved, applying
EndUser Development (EUD) techniques [