I’ve just returned from the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA2006) and saw a very cool project there that could be easily be co-opted by medical practitioners to help explain (often confusing and specialized) results to patients.
BodyDaemon is an Internet server created by Carlos Castellanos that runs and is configured by biofeedback mechanisms. Users strap themselves up to various measurement devices like pulse monitors, respirators, and galvanic skin response testers, and then the readings are used to configure and run the server, as well as to create a variety of visualizations.
On a very basic level, hospitals already have tools like this – the heart rate monitor with its little green blips is not dissimiliar – but these tools are mainly used for making measurements that help doctors do their jobs better by monitoring patients. There’s a special way to read them that medical practitioners understand, but that is often meaningless to patients – the patient might be able to see that their heart rate is 72, but they don’t necessarily know what that means. The possibilities posed by more interactive tools are intriguing, then. It’s one thing for a doctor to say “Smoking is killing you,” for example. But what if the unhealthy patient could breathe into a tube and have her breath power a runner in a video game race against a similarly equipped non-smoking patient? It would be a lot more obvious to her how weak her lungs have become. Instead of simple measurement and visualization systems, in other words, these existing tools could be used both as a way for doctors to measure status and as pedagogical tools for patients to understand what the results actually mean for them.
