After about a year of waiting, my senior project exploring 3D Patient Records for Dentistry has been published as the cover story in the Journal of the American Dental Association (JADA)! I had no idea our work would end up getting published let alone in a journal like JADA. I’m also very excited that our group was able to get a 2 page attachment explaining what user centered design is to an audience that is not very familiar with the field but will hopefully want to push for more exploration of it in medicine.

I’d like to thank the professors at the University of Pittsburgh Center for Dental Informatics, Titus Schleyer and Thankam Thyvalikakath, and the head of the Carnegie Mellon HCI undergraduate project course, Jason Hong, for making this all possible.

See the research write-ups and video demo for the paper.

Microsoft is shaking up the consumer health technology landscape today with their launch of HealthVault. The site allows anyone to sign up and store and share all of your health information and the health information of your family (even pets). The most intriguing part of the application is how Microsoft has offloaded much of the data entering, viewing, and manipulating work to third parties. Organizations like the AHA build blood pressure trackers and hardware companies like Johnson & Johnson allow data from the devices to feed into the HealthVault.

So in a way Microsoft has offloaded much of the user experience of storing health information to third parties. While this probably helped them get a jump on Google and other players in getting the product out, I think it leads to a very disjointed experience. I need to go to the AHA to enter my blood pressure and to another program with another set of visualization tools to look at another type of health measurement. A good move would be to create a Facebook style hosting platform where these third parties could host the front ends of their applications within a section of the HealthVault, or at least have a place where viewing and data entry are accessible.

The thing that I like most is the downloadable Connection Center application. It syncs the data from a variety of hardware monitors and uploads them to your Health Vault account. In the end, it’s this kind of usefulness and ease of use that is needed for people to make the leap to use a system like this. Privacy is always a concern, but time and time again we see the initial privacy scare fade away with every new technology. Remember when online banking seemed like a gamble? There’s a threshold at which the usefulness of the new paradigm mitigated our privacy fears.

But here’s where Microsoft’s partner strategy takes a twist. By having you give access to a third party to enter data, your information is always going through another party besides Microsoft. This seems a bit strange, akin to Citibank making me funnel all my transactions through Paypal. Because of that Health Vault really should have at least some basic information entry and editing so that it can work in a complete silo.