12 research outputs found

    The Design of Interactive Visualizations and Analytics for Public Health Data

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    Public health data plays a critical role in ensuring the health of the populace. Professionals use data as they engage in efforts to improve and protect the health of communities. For the public, data influences their ability to make health-related decisions. Health literacy, which is the ability of an individual to access, understand, and apply health data, is a key determinant of health. At present, people seeking to use public health data are confronted with a myriad of challenges some of which relate to the nature and structure of the data. Interactive visualizations are a category of computational tools that can support individuals as they seek to use public health data. With interactive visualizations, individuals can access underlying data, change how data is represented, manipulate various visual elements, and in certain tools control and perform analytic tasks. That being said, currently, in public health, simple visualizations, which fail to effectively support the exploration of large sets of data, are predominantly used. The goal of this dissertation is to demonstrate the benefit of sophisticated interactive visualizations and analytics. As improperly designed visualizations can negatively impact users’ discourse with data, there is a need for frameworks to help designers think systematically about design issues. Furthermore, there is a need to demonstrate how such frameworks can be utilized. This dissertation includes a process by which designers can create health visualizations. Using this process, five novel visualizations were designed to facilitate making sense of public health data. Three studies were conducted with the visualizations. The first study explores how computational models can be used to make sense of the discourse of health on a social media platform. The second study investigates the use of instructional materials to improve visualization literacy. Visualization literacy is important because even when visualizations are designed properly, there still exists a gap between how a tool works and users’ perceptions of how the tool should work. The last study examines the efficacy of visualizations to improve health literacy. Overall then, this dissertation provides designers with a deeper understanding of how to systematically design health visualizations

    Framework For Spatiotemporal Visualization of Community Health In a Smart And Connected Community (SCC)

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    Smart and Connected Community (SCC) will use health data of the community members for knowledge generation beyond mobile health (mHealth). Current mHealth only assists individual users to monitor their health status, but do not allow integration and interpretation of collective health data. The objective of this thesis is to exhibit the continuous health status of the community members through a framework of visualization including spatial and temporal plots, such as anonymous user health severity graph, severity flow plot, a severity map view, the cumulative and segmented animation. The framework composes of physiological data collection with smartphones and sharing of anonymous data to SCC health server. Physiological data is sent from the smartphone app in JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) format and stored in the server database. Temporal visualization is presented as graph and flow, whereas spatial visualization utilizes Google Map overlay to display the severity distribution through the color code of severity. Furthermore, an animation mode is developed that displays combined spatiotemporal data over the selected duration in either cumulative or segmented at specified intervals. To implement this, a web-based dynamic server is used. The front end of the server is built with JavaScript JQuery and Ajax, whereas the backend of the server is managed by Hypertext Preprocessor, i.e. PHP, a server-side scripting language. The phpMyAdmin (administration tool for MySQL) stores the JSON data that comes from the smartphone app. To assess the framework, we utilized the MIT-BIH database with pre-recorded data from Arrhythmia patients. We assume each dataset record as a community member (subject). From these records, we classified arrhythmia and measure severity ranging from 0 to 100 considering various severity of arrhythmia (e.g. ventricular tachycardia is the most severe). These data are then randomized to a different location and fed to the visualization tool for functionally verify and assess the performance of the visualization tool. Furthermore, a survey was conducted to collect feedback about the visualization tool that shows that 81.4% participants in pre-session and 84.75% in post-session provided positive feedback about the visualization of health data. By using this framework, community members can generate collective knowledge that might assist community stakeholders such as the Health Department to improve community health by identifying health issues, developing strategies, and resource allocation

    My Story. Digital Storytelling across Europe for Social Cohesion

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    ‘My Story’ (Mysty) is a pan-European, Erasmus+ funded Digital Storytelling project focused on intercultural competency. It has eight partners (HE, secondary schools and NGOs) across four countries (Austria, Italy, Hungary and the UK) and involves the collection, editing and uploading of digital stories to a shared ‘toolbox’. These stories focus on ‘food’, ‘family’ and ‘festival’ and act as a platform for diversity awareness and digital upskilling. The project is driven by the principle that innovative teaching resources form part of broader pedagogic strategies that can actively help tackle issues of diversity common across the EU. The paper discusses the process the project went through, some of its challenges and its results and, on the basis of these, looks at the role digital storytelling as a way of expressing different ethical, cultural or personal issues

    Object narratives, imaginings and multilingual communities: young people’s digital stories in the making

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    This paper draws on research from a global 5-year project, Critical Connections: Multilingual Digital Storytelling (2012-2017), which links language and intercultural learning with literacy, active citizenship and the arts. A critical ethnographic approach was adopted in the research project and the multilingual digital stories were an integral part of the research process. With the project’s focus on multilingualism and creation of bilingual digital texts, young people had to imagine how to use language in new contexts, uncover narratives around objects, and negotiate interfaces between different cultural landscapes. The research findings revealed the complexity of multilingual digital storytelling and how young people (aged 6-18 years old) learnt to become meaning makers discovering their own voices in unfamiliar contexts. Through these digital stories the young people forged strong links with the past and created new multilingual communities

    My Story. Digital Storytelling across Europe for Social Cohesion

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    ‘My Story’ (Mysty) is a pan-European, Erasmus+ funded Digital Storytelling project focused on intercultural competency. It has eight partners (HE, secondary schools and NGOs) across four countries (Austria, Italy, Hungary and the UK) and involves the collection, editing and uploading of digital stories to a shared ‘toolbox’. These stories focus on ‘food’, ‘family’ and ‘festival’ and act as a platform for diversity awareness and digital upskilling. The project is driven by the principle that innovative teaching resources form part of broader pedagogic strategies that can actively help tackle issues of diversity common across the EU. The paper discusses the process the project went through, some of its challenges and its results and, on the basis of these, looks at the role digital storytelling as a way of expressing different ethical, cultural or personal issues

    2016, UMaine News Press Releases

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    This is a catalog of press releases put out by the University of Maine Division of Marketing and Communications between January 4, 2016 and December 30, 2016
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