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for Public Health Applications
Virginia Tech Center for Human-Computer Interaction
The Virginia Tech Center for Human-Computer Interaction is working with the New River Health District (http://www.vdh.state.va.us/lhd/newriver/) and other members of
the New River Public Health Partnership (http://www.nrphp.org/) to explore opportunities for innovative types of interaction afforded by deployment of advanced network infrastructure. Our research interests include the following questions:
- The Internet provides access to a vast array of sources of medical information, including resources such as the National Library of Medicine's MEDLINEplus and PubMed libraries. What tools would allow health professionals to better use this information, or tailor this information for use by the communities they serve? What tools would support construction of new web-based materials, created by health professionals to address local issues?
- Listserves and similar email-based systems facilitate distribution of information. What are the opportunities for enhancing communication among participants in these systems by providing capabilities for richer interactions? Can such interactions be encouraged by greater awareness of who is using information distributed via these broadcast mechanisms?
- Video conferencing is becoming increasingly practical as a medium for remote training and telemedicine. What technologies can be developed to augment video links to provide collaborative authoring, markup, and data manipulation? To what extent can fluid transitions between synchronous (interactive) and asynchronous (store-and-forward) modes of interaction be supported? What tools can be used to facilitate these kinds of remote interactions in cases where bandwidth or scheduling precludes the use of video links?
- The Internet provides infrastructure for updating and accessing centralized data repositories. What technologies are needed to allow health professionals to construct and use data-sharing systems to quickly meet emergent, localized requirements? What tools could foster sharing of tacit knowledge necessary to effectively interpret data? How can GIS data be used as a foundation for building data-sharing tools?
- Planning responses to natural or man-made emergencies requires internal communication among distributed stakeholders in the community. It also requires mechanisms that support public education and risk communcation. How can collaborative technologies facilitate these internal and external communication tasks?
- The distributed nature of both current and future Internet technologies raise considerable challenges for evaluation. Are health care consumers and professionals making effective use of available local and national Web resources? What instruments can be used to evaluate these technologies and plan enhancements? As new interactive tools emerge that allow greater interaction among users whose activity may be distributed across both time and space, how can we evaluate and improve usability of the tools, awareness of collaborators' activity, and practicality for wider deployment?
The demonstrations on this site illustrate current and envisioned collaborative technologies that could be used to support public health applications.