On Regulatory and Organizational Constraints in Visualization Design and Evaluation

Problem-based visualization research provides explicit guidance toward identifying and designing for the needs of users, but absent is more concrete guidance toward factors external to a user's needs that also have implications for visualization design and evaluation. This lack of more explicit guidance can leave visualization researchers and practitioners vulnerable to unforeseen constraints beyond the user's needs that can affect the validity of evaluations, or even lead to the premature termination of a project. Here we explore two types of external constraints in depth, regulatory and organizational constraints, and describe how these constraints impact visualization design and evaluation. By borrowing from techniques in software development, project management, and visualization research we recommend strategies for identifying, mitigating, and evaluating these external constraints through a design study methodology. Finally, we present an application of those recommendations in a healthcare case study. We argue that by explicitly incorporating external constraints into visualization design and evaluation, researchers and practitioners can improve the utility and validity of their visualization solution and improve the likelihood of successful collaborations with industries where external constraints are more present.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures, presented at BELIV workshop associated with IEEE VIS 201

Use of synthetic health data in prototyping for developing dental implant registry services

Developing novel applications in healthcare and dentistry can be challenging due to lack of application requirements, uncertain stakeholders, and no available test data. Such conditions exist in tooth implant dentistry, where innovative services are needed to record and communicate data. This study investigates how manually generated synthetic data can support the development and demonstration of new services for a dental implant registry. Furthermore, other objectives are to evaluate the usefulness of the developed services and to determine whether the development process has contributed to improving the data model used by a dental implant register. To answer these objectives, we have through the use of design science methodology developed a high-fidelity dashboard prototype and a synthetic dataset in parallel. The development process was carried out in iterations, involving stakeholders as early as possible. The results indicate that the use of synthetic data to demonstrate possible future services was an essential component of the development process, facilitating early active participation of stakeholders. In particular, data with some realistic qualities were the most valuable in this process. Furthermore, the development process we used resulted in some contributions to the registry's data model, but fewer than expected. In summary, the services we developed were deemed useful by stakeholders. These results suggest that synthetic data generated manually, together with a high-fidelity prototype, may contribute to involving stakeholders early in the development process. This participation may ease the process of identifying application requirements and engaging stakeholders, potentially producing useful features.Masteroppgave i Programutvikling samarbeid med HVLPROG399MAMN-PRO

A Scientific Roadmap for Antibiotic Discovery: A Sustained and Robust Pipeline of New Antibacterial Drugs and Therapies is Critical to Preserve Public Health

In recent decades, the discovery and development of new antibiotics have slowed dramatically as scientific barriers to drug discovery, regulatory challenges, and diminishing returns on investment have led major drug companies to scale back or abandon their antibiotic research. Consequently, antibiotic discovery—which peaked in the 1950s—has dropped precipitously. Of greater concern is the fact that nearly all antibiotics brought to market over the past 30 years have been variations on existing drugs. Every currently available antibiotic is a derivative of a class discovered between the early 1900s and 1984.At the same time, the emergence of antibiotic-resistant pathogens has accelerated, giving rise to life-threatening infections that will not respond to available antibiotic treatment. Inevitably, the more that antibiotics are used, the more that bacteria develop resistance—rendering the drugs less effective and leading public health authorities worldwide to flag antibiotic resistance as an urgent and growing public health threat

Randomised controlled trials of complex interventions and large-scale transformation of services

Complex interventions and large-scale transformations of services are necessary to meet the health-care challenges of the 21st century. However, the evaluation of these types of interventions is challenging and requires methodological development. Innovations such as cluster randomised controlled trials, stepped-wedge designs, and non-randomised evaluations provide options to meet the needs of decision-makers. Adoption of theory and logic models can help clarify causal assumptions, and process evaluation can assist in understanding delivery in context. Issues of implementation must also be considered throughout intervention design and evaluation to ensure that results can be scaled for population benefit. Relevance requires evaluations conducted under real-world conditions, which in turn requires a pragmatic attitude to design. The increasing complexity of interventions and evaluations threatens the ability of researchers to meet the needs of decision-makers for rapid results. Improvements in efficiency are thus crucial, with electronic health records offering significant potential

Biopiracy <i>versus </i>one-world medicine – from colonial relicts to global collaborative concepts

Background: Practices of biopiracy to use genetic resources and indigenous knowledge by Western companies without benefit-sharing of those, who generated the traditional knowledge, can be understood as form of neocolonialism.Hypothesis: : The One-World Medicine concept attempts to merge the best of traditional medicine from developing countries and conventional Western medicine for the sake of patients around the globe.Study design: Based on literature searches in several databases, a concept paper has been written. Legislative initiatives of the United Nations culminated in the Nagoya protocol aim to protect traditional knowledge and regulate benefit-sharing with indigenous communities. The European community adopted the Nagoya protocol, and the corresponding regulations will be implemented into national legislation among the member states. Despite pleasing progress, infrastructural problems of the health care systems in developing countries still remain. Current approaches to secure primary health care offer only fragmentary solutions at best. Conventional medicine from industrialized countries cannot be afforded by the impoverished population in the Third World. Confronted with exploding costs, even health systems in Western countries are endangered to burst. Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is popular among the general public in industrialized countries, although the efficacy is not sufficiently proven according to the standards of evidence-based medicine. CAM is often available without prescription as over-the-counter products with non-calculated risks concerning erroneous self-medication and safety/toxicity issues. The concept of integrative medicine attempts to combine holistic CAM approaches with evidence-based principles of conventional medicine.Conclusion: To realize the concept of One-World Medicine, a number of standards have to be set to assure safety, efficacy and applicability of traditional medicine, e.g. sustainable production and quality control of herbal products, performance of placebo-controlled, double-blind, randomized clinical trials, phytovigilance, as well as education of health professionals and patients

"Whose data is it anyway?" The implications of putting small area-level health and social data online

International audienceThe planetary exospheres are poorly known in their outer parts, since the neutral densities are low compared with the instruments detection capabilities. The exospheric models are thus often the main source of information at such high altitudes. We present a new way to take into account analytically the additional effect of the radiation pressure on planetary exospheres. In a series of papers, we present with an Hamiltonian approach the effect of the radiation pressure on dynamical trajectories, density profiles and escaping thermal flux. Our work is a generalization of the study by Bishop and Chamberlain (1989). In this second part of our work, we present here the density profiles of atomic Hydrogen in planetary exospheres subject to the radiation pressure. We first provide the altitude profiles of ballistic particles (the dominant exospheric population in most cases), which exhibit strong asymmetries that explain the known geotail phenomenon at Earth. The radiation pressure strongly enhances the densities compared with the pure gravity case (i.e. the Chamberlain profiles), in particular at noon and midnight. We finally show the existence of an exopause that appears naturally as the external limit for bounded particles, above which all particles are escaping