To paraphrase one of the Microsoft marketing videos for the new surface computing paradigm, "the line between the physical and virtual worlds becomes increasingly thin."
I promised I would come back and look closer at the post on surface computing by Dr. Bill Crounse, Microsoft Worldwide Health Director, which you can find over at HealthBlog. I checked out the videos Bill recommends and got up to speed on some of the ideas he's had as to the uses of this new user interface technology for healthcare. Microsoft calls it "Milan", and you're likely to see it first in places that have little to do with healthcare, like hotels and casinos. To me, though, what's fascinating is not the device itself, in this case a coffee-table size computer whose entire top surface is a touchscreen, but the implications of the underlying human-computer interface (HCI) paradigm.
I recommend you check Dr Crounse's surface computing videos out, but also take a look at the video he did with UCSF CMIO Michael Blum and VP Joel French of Motion Computing. As Dr Crounse puts it, "Put two and two together, and I think you'll begin to see where all this is going."
Finally, if you take a look at another video I recently did with UCSF physician and CMIO, Dr. Michael Blum, and Motion Computing VP, Joel French, you'll catch us talking about the touch screen features found on Motion Computing's newest Tablet PCs running Windows Vista.
To me one of the key features of surface computing is less than sexy and not mentioned in much depth in the Milan videos, but with potentially many more implications than the eye candy applications that are used to promote Milan. I'm thinking about the capacity to capture information using Bluetooth from devices placed on the surface.
Picture if you will a healthcare delivery environment where many flat surfaces contain embedded user interfaces like those in Milan and the health professionals are carrying devices like Motion Computing's C5 Mobile Clinical Assistant in place of the traditional clipboard. The C5 can capture information via RFID and Bluetooth and has an optional bar code reader, so it is an ideal device for mobile data capture. It can communicate by wireless LAN and 3G cellular data transmission.
One of the key architectural challenges facing applications in increasingly mobile computing environments is intermittent connectivity. I wrote about this in my scenario planning paper Possible Futures of Application Architectures a few years ago.
What if the WLAN goes down? Will healthcare delivery be impinged by such interruptions? The interruptions are inevitable, so health professionals offered LAN-based are either going to shun it altogether to avoid getting dependent on it, or become dependent on it and suffer the consequences when outages occur. Or perhaps I should say "when an outage occurs", because if they get burned hard enough they will lose their dependency on mobile technology very quickly.
Now add in the surface computing paradigm, and a family of EMR-based decision support applications that can interact with a surface computing device. Putting the C5 down on an active surface enables bidirectional transfer of data, so the applications can both upload necessary data to continue working through any unforeseen outage and download data captured during the healthcare delivery process.
When you add this kind of capability to the sexier user interface aspects that are so obviously pertinent to specialties like radiology, and you can see a pretty bright future for surface computing.
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