An iconic language for the graphical representation of medical concepts

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Many medication errors are encountered in drug prescriptions, which would not occur if practitioners could remember the drug properties. They can refer to drug monographs to find these properties, however drug monographs are long and tedious to read during consultation. We propose a two-step approach for facilitating access to drug monographs. The first step, presented here, is the design of a graphical language, called VCM.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>The VCM graphical language was designed using a small number of graphical primitives and combinatory rules. VCM was evaluated over 11 volunteer general practitioners to assess if the language is easy to learn, to understand and to use. Evaluators were asked to register their VCM training time, to indicate the meaning of VCM icons and sentences, and to answer clinical questions related to randomly generated drug monograph-like documents, supplied in text or VCM format.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>VCM can represent the various signs, diseases, physiological states, life habits, drugs and tests described in drug monographs. Grammatical rules make it possible to generate many icons by combining a small number of primitives and reusing simple icons to build more complex ones. Icons can be organized into simple sentences to express drug recommendations. Evaluation showed that VCM was learnt in 2 to 7 hours, that physicians understood 89% of the tested VCM icons, and that they answered correctly to 94% of questions using VCM (versus 88% using text, <it>p </it>= 0.003) and 1.8 times faster (<it>p </it>< 0.001).</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>VCM can be learnt in a few hours and appears to be easy to read. It can now be used in a second step: the design of graphical interfaces facilitating access to drug monographs. It could also be used for broader applications, including the design of interfaces for consulting other types of medical document or medical data, or, very simply, to enrich medical texts.</p

Cognitive Ability Evaluation using Virtual Reality and Eye Tracking

This work aims to create a virtual reality (VR) representation of Ravens progressive matrices (RPM) and apply available eye tracking (ET) technology to determine where the test person\u27s eye gaze is located during the test. RPM are developed to evaluate abstract reasoning and there is a possibility to further understand the mental processes of the test person by adding ET. The result of this project is a test scenario where the user completes ten tasks from RPM in a VR environment. Reports containing heat maps and trajectories describing the eye gaze together with times and results of the tasks are automatically generated after the test has been completed. This extended information which is automatically gathered is meant to further expand the toolbox that psychologists use when performing psychological testing and might aid them in improving the accuracy of the results obtained from these tests

Dag Hammarskjöld, the United Nations and Africa

Once upon a time there was a Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN), who was elected into office during the Cold War era because the big powers believed he was just a humble servant to their interests. They were wrong. Even‐handedness, integrity, moral leadership, respect for otherness, loyalty to principles and ethical values, as enshrined in the UN Charter, were among the core values he represented. Dag Hammarskjöld held a firm belief in the autonomy of the office of the UN Secretary‐General and the Secretariat, which ought not to be degraded to a mere instrument and conference machinery serving the interests of the powerful states. Hammarskjöld was determined not to surrender the power of definition to individual member states.http://tandfonline.com/loi/crea2