=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1658/paper2
|storemode=property
|title=A Dynamic Approach to Medical Data Visualization and Interaction
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1658/paper2.pdf
|volume=Vol-1658
|authors=Vitoantonio Bevilacqua,Fabio Cassano,Giovanni Dimauro,Francesco Girardi,Antonio Piccinno
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/avi/BevilacquaCDGP16
}}
==A Dynamic Approach to Medical Data Visualization and Interaction==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1658/paper2.pdf
A Dynamic Approach to Medical Data
Visualization and Interaction
Vitoantonio Bevilacqua1 , Fabio Cassano2 , Giovanni Dimauro2 ,
Francesco Girardi3 , and Antonio Piccinno2
1
Dipartimento di Ingegneria Elettrica e dell’Informazione
Politecnico di Bari, via Orabona 4, 70125 Bari, Italy
2
Dipartimento di Informatica,
Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro, Piazza Umberto I 1, 70121 Bari, Italy
3
ASL Bari,
Lungomare Starita 6, 70123 Bari, Italy
Abstract. Modern web applications lack in flexibility 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 Person-
ale” (RESP, in English ”Personal Sanitary Electronic Registry”) is a pro-
totype 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 medi-
cal data, and allow them to analyze their lifestyle. This real-time health
monitoring give patients a better awareness on their overall status.
1 Introduction
Since the last decade, the Italian Government is tempting the Public Administra-
tion (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) [1][2][3].
An example of EHR is the ”Registro Elettronico Sanitario Personale” (RESP,
in English ”Personal Sanitary Electronic Registry”), an on-line available proto-
type of electronic medical record that stores and shows patient’s data [4]. As
the most patient-centered electronic medical record, it not only allows patients
to search and keep in touch with their preferred care-provider physician, but
also to report them any occurring issue. However this approach results static
and may bring patients to access the RESP only though assistance is needed.
On care-giving side, there is no real-time knowledge though any patient’s health
parameter is becoming critical. This situation may lead to late assistance. To
improve both patient and care-provider awareness of the overall patient’s health
status, we have studied a dynamic and customizable approach to the personal
medical data. This involves the usage of many real-time sensors to catch data and
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allow users to customize the way those are shown. In this way, while patients can
monitor medical data and visualize their history to analyze the lifestyle, care-
provider can promptly spot any issue and give a fast assistance. Furthermore,
showing those kind of information in every user’s home page can lead to a deeper
parameter monitoring for every user.
The adoption of the electronic medical record rather than the classical one,
is a way to revolutionize people’s approach to health [5]. Thanks to modern
pervasive systems of sensors (e.g. Internet of Things (IoT) devices) and the
advantage of the modern smart-phone applications, people get involved in a
more healthy lifestyle [6]. Despite many studies, currently there are no unified
platforms where all those data are conveyed and where users can easily get an
overview [7][8]. In fact each i-health sensor or application has its own proprietary
(sometimes commercial) web portal where only specified data are shown.
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, differently 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 find a fixed menu with useful medical utilities (such as patient’s
diary, diagnoses, personal files, 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 Zig-
Bee based devices or other commercial solutions such as the Nest [9] [10]. In
a context where the patient owns a smart house and constantly use health ap-
plications on the smart-phone, RESP can become the main landmark for the
collection and visualization of all those information. In this work we propose to
change the patient’s home page by showing:
1. Different and customizable views allowing users to rearrange them;
2. Hourly/daily graphs for each desired sensor;
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Fig. 1: The current patient RESP home page
3. Historical graphs for those parameters that cannot be daily or hourly mon-
itored.
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 modified 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 different 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 ser-
vices developed by some major technology companies, such as Microsoft with
HealthVault and Apple with iOS Health, RESP purpose is different. While com-
mercial 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.
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(a) (b)
Fig. 2: The proposed RESP main Graphical User Interface: the patient home
page (a); the available graphs accessible to the patient from its home page (b).
3 Conclusions and Future Works
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 End-
User Development (EUD) techniques [11]. This study, is going to be tested and
validated by different users according to the EUD theory and will evolve in many
future works:
– The proposed patient customization will be ported to the care-providers
(physicians, nurses, pharmacists etc.) home page showing all patient’s crit-
ical situations. In this way, if necessary, care-providers can promptly give
assistance or suggest them a medical examination. This support can be ex-
tended by creating, on care-providers side, an Expert System that, for ex-
ample, may study patient’s walk and warn for an Alzheimer disease start.
This could lead to critical situation like patient’s fall and can be detected
by using a system like described in [12].
– The actual care-provider’s GUI allows users to get a fast (but static) overview
of a single patient’s health status (shown in Fig 3). This GUI will be improved
(e.g. including dynamic menu) to better keep in touch with the patients
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(a)
(b)
Fig. 3: The actual RESP care-provider GUI: the patient’s list (a); once the care-
provider clicks on the patient’s detail, a view with the patient’s last visit is shown
(b).
health. Every care-provider will be able to customize the view of his/her
patients by the specific pathology they are affected.
– A mobile application will be developed in order to keep all users closer to
their health status and lifestyle. Push notifications can warn care-providers
and patients if many sensor are recording some critical value or may suggest
patient to improve the lifestyle.
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