Future of Health IT: Trends and Scenarios

The future of computing and communications: random thoughts, part 4

Here's another example of where HCI is headed: multi-touch sensing.

If you have seen an iPod touch or iPhone from Apple, or the Microsoft Surface coffee-table computer, you have seen early examples of what multi-touch computing is all about. Single-touch computing operates like a mouse: touching moves the mouse pointer, tapping is like clicking, tap-and-drag works like click-and-drag.

These early commercial products in the multi-touch realm add a second recognized touch point, allowing you to resize and rotate screen objects using two separate fingers. Multi-touch doesn't have to stop at two touch-points though, nor is it limited to the kinds of two-dimensional operations we associate with mouse-as-pointer interaction. Check out Jeff Han's (NYU) page regarding multi-touch interfaces:

While touch sensing is commonplace for single points of contact, multi-touch sensing enables a user to interact with a system with more than one finger at a time, as in chording and bi-manual operations. Such sensing devices are inherently also able to accommodate multiple users simultaneously, which is especially useful for larger interaction scenarios such as interactive walls and tabletops.

The Perceptive Pixel company is the vehicle NYU has spun off to commercialize Han's inventions. You can search YouTube to find more videos of Han showing off his inventions at various conference and media venues.

The IT community's greatest challenge

This is another one of those posts that has taken me a while to write - a little over a month, in fact. Today I added a few final sentences and feel it is finally good to go. Whew! I feel the subject was important enough to be worth the effort. I hope you feel that way too.

Back at the end of March, I read an online article by Bill Snyder at the Infoworld site called Multi-core to leave developers in dust?. It concerned the looming challenge of leveraging the parallel processing resources being made possible by the emergence of inexpensive, soon-to-be-utterly-ubiquitous multiple-core CPUs.  Snyder feels the IT industry is not ready for the challenge. I agree. I first wrote about the problem last December in a post entitled The Landscape of Parallel Computing Research: the NY Times and Berkeley EECS. In many ways this post is a continuation of that thread.

Here's a bit of what Snyder has to say:

That's not to say that the IT industry is scoffing at the potential benefits of multi-core processing. But the mountain between IT and some future multi-core promise land -- namely, the task of developing parallelized apps that keep pace with continual core advances -- is huge, says David Patterson, the Pardee Professor of Computing Science at UC Berkeley and director of the parallel computing lab. "It's the biggest challenge in 50 years of computing. If we do this, it's a chance to reset the foundation of computing."

In the short run, Patterson says, we can parallelize legacy software and gamble on getting value out of eight cores. But that would be only an interim solution, as such apps would not scale to 32 or 64 cores, he adds.

What is frustrating is that this problem didn't exactly sneak up on the industry. Chip development cycles are very long, and key software developers are well aware of what's moving through the pipeline. Sure, software always lags hardware. Many of us complained that we didn't have software that would take advantage of 500MHz back in the '90s. But what Patterson and others call the multi-core revolution poses problems for developers that are qualitatively different than the problems of the past. Why wait so long to get serious about solving them?

The answer to the last question is, in my opinion, a personality characteristic common among IT personnel, which is the always-incorrect belief that my current technology - architectural model, operating system, hardware platform, programming language, integrated development environment, application framework, or what-have-you - is the be-all and end-all of IT evolution.

Case in point: Not long ago I was indirectly involved in the port of an application from Ingres on a Vax to a Java/J2EE platform on Windows 2003 Server (web container) and JBoss/Oracle on Linux (EJB container and DBMS).  A single programmer had worked on the system for almost 20 years, was not far from retirement, and had much fear of and no interest in learning the new technologies. What was sad about the situation is not the programmer's mindset, but the fact that her managers had allowed the situation to devolve into the state it was in at the time of the need for conversion. If the leaders don't lead, the followers oftentimes don't follow.  This was by no means the only time I have encountered this mindset malaise.

First Annual Chinese New Year Predictions

Making my technology predictions during the Chinese New Year celebration seems like it will be a lot easier than joining the crowd at the Western calendar's equivalent.  Not only is there less competition, but I have the benefit of reading everybody else's before I do mine.

I find, though, that I have a distinctly different point of view (POV) than most prognosticators.  There are two varieties that seem to predominate.

CP Split™ Technology

A few weeks ago, I wrote a brief post about Steve Beller's CP Split™ Technology. With the pressures of a Master's thesis, a new grandson, and a bunch of interesting and exciting grant proposals to be written, I haven't had much chance to write more about it. I think it's important enough, though, that I plan to write about it regularly.

Why is it important? Because enterprise computing of all kinds in the next few decades is going to require a lot of gluing together of legacy applications, and moreover, to glue all kinds of apps together into workflows.  People don't do word processing or spreadsheets or clinical research data management per se, they execute business functions using routines often called workflows in which multiple people interact using multiple information media, message, and repository types.  Data are tranformed at each step along the way.

Many tasks within routines are now computerized, but by no means all tasks for most routines, and one reasons for not automating is that tasks within the workflows are performed using different applications.

CPSplit uses a publish/subscribe paradigm that is best understood thinking about newspapers and periodicals, but the analogy can be extended across many types of workflows.  If you picture the admissions desk at a clinic as a publisher, many subscribers exist for the desk's "publications": the clinical team, billing, the lab, and others.

Rather than reinvent the wheel, I'm including an extensive quote from a post called Node Network Using the CP Split Technology. There are references to diagrams, which you can see by reading the whole post. I highly recommend it; it's a bit technical but worth the effort to grasp this paradigm for application integration.

The Node as Publisher box depicts a node using one or more of its publisher template-models to: Acquire content from the sources specified by its models -- as depicted by the arrow from Data Input to Data/Information Sources -- and place each content element in the cells of software grids (spreadsheet worksheets). Manipulate the content in the cells as necessary using mathematical, statistical, financial, logical, inferential, date & time, and/or text functions as defined by the algorithms in its template-models. Package the resulting content in encrypted, delimited (e.g., comma separated value) Content Files and transmit them to its subscribers via e-mail or any other methods as depicted by the Content File box. Note that these files contain the actual content to be reported, including (a) ranges of calculated and raw numeric values and (b) text (e.g., strings and blocks of alphanumeric text, hyperlinks to documents and graphic files, web site URLs, etc). They do not, however, contain any formatting instructions or metadata, which make the files very small. The Node as Subscriber box depicts a node’s subscriber/presenter template-model taking the contents of the Content File it receives and placing each content element in pre-defined cells in its own template-model grid having a structure mirroring the template-model used by the publisher to create the%

Chip makers take center stage at conference

Link: MercuryNews.com | 02/12/2007 | Chip makers take center stage at conference.

In the video game arena, a partnership of IBM, Toshiba and Sony will talk about the massive performance improvements in the next generation Cell chip, the heart of future Sony PlayStations and other game consoles. IBM will be making good on its previous promise to have the next Cell processor, running much faster than its current chips.

Supercomputing geeks may be intrigued by Intel's discussion of a research project, a supercomputer on a chip with processing speed of more than 1 teraflops, or 1 trillion floating point operations per second.

The industry's hottest topic -- adding more and more cores, or processing engines, to a single chip -- will be discussed at a session today.

Adding more cores lets chip makers keep up with Moore's Law, an industry axiom that predicted that the number of transistors on a chip will double about every two years.

It also is a way to increase a chip's computing power without packing in millions more transistors onto a single piece of silicon -- a density that creates problems with excess heat and power use.

``Since we really can't push the clock up much more, the only way you can get more processing is in parallel,'' said Will Strauss, an analyst with Forward Concepts.

Economist.com: The phone of the future

The Economist is my favorite print periodical publication. Its Technology Quarterly is something I look forward to every March, June, September, and December. The latest has just arrived, and if you don't subscribe, I recommend buying a copy so you can read every word. I'm giving the link to the story here  (The phone of the future), but the Economist designates some content as Premium, meaning only for subscribers.

In this case the linked article is publicly accessible, but there is a tie-in article that is Premium, as is much of the rest of the Technology Quarterly and the magazine as a whole. Here's an excerpt from the lead-in to the article:

The phone has had a splendid 130-year history. What will it look like in future? Will it even be called a phone?

The telephone has changed beyond recognition since its invention in 1876, and is now both the most personal, most social and most rapidly evolving technological device. So to imagine the phone of the future is also to imagine the future of consumer technology, and its personal and social impact. What mobile phones will look like in a year or two is easy to guess: they will be slimmer and probably will let you watch television on the move. But what about ten or 15 years from now?

That, indeed is the question. Given its trajectory from lunchbox-sized doorstop to slim, flashy color multimedia player/recorder, and from scratchy, undependable voice calls to flawless reception and transmission of voice music, photo, and video in about twenty years, it is indeed a strange torpedo on a wild ride.

The Birth of Trivergence

While poking around looking for info on Zune, I came across a blog at Accenture that is based on a concept I hadn't heard of yet - Trivergence, or the convergence of devices, data, and software-based controls in a networked environment. The initial post, The Birth of Trivergence, explains it well, and a separate page, Trivergence Basics, explains it in more depth. The blog is done by Andy Zimmerman, head of a consulting group that deals with the major US telcos and cablecos.

recently guys in my practice had been talking a lot about the ubiquity of network access—or "IP Everywhere" as they put it. Maybe there is something there—maybe in the area of devices. Then I happened upon a Sun Microsystems piece that predicted 17 billion networked devices by 2012.

Now this is getting interesting! A lot of those devices are going to be small and inaccessible, and you need some way to control them remotely. Voila! The SoftPanel: A user portal into the world of devices.

Devices with no buttons. That’s really cool. That’s something to talk about! But am I making this all up?

About then Apple introduced the iPod Shuffle. In his product announcement, Steve Jobs talked about the problem of putting complex controls on a device the size of a package of chewing gum. His designers came up with the epiphany that not everything had to be on the device itself, but—thanks to ubiquitous networking—some functions could be relocated to the PC. OK, it’s happening. I kicked out my $99 and got one. My God! This stuff really works!

Once I got it, the whole thing seemed obvious. Almost everyone I explained the concept to—colleagues, clients, friends and family—also got it right away.

Interesting stuff. We will be (and in many cases already are) controlling a multitude of devices through interfaces that reside on other devices. This has many potential implications for clinical research, and I will look for ways to explore them more as time goes by.

SERENDIPITY: Older Wiser Wired

While looking at the Guidelines Sorting Tool, a cool feature of the US DHHS's usability.gov guidelines tome, I stumbled across the AARP's subsite on computer use by adults over 50 - Older Wiser Wired - Adults over 50 Online, Life and Living - AARP. 

This is a great find for those of us interested in making our Websites usable to persons other than college sophomores and baristas, who in any case spend most of their time on MySpace, YouTube, Second Life, World of Warcraft, and Google Everything rather than visiting the sites and applications we build and the blogs we write.

Second Life and the Amish

My misgivings about Second Life expressed in the post Real Is Beautiful brought an email response from Paul Hartzog, a fellow grad student at Michigan and the a leading proponent of Panarchy, the most obviously sane, rational, and just form of government - therefore perhaps the one we are least likely to experience in our lifetimes. :-) Our brief exchange is reproduced here with permission. We ended up with him pointing me to a Wired article about technology and the Amish, which led me to look more deeply into the concerns I have.

Storytron: an Interactive Storytelling Engine

The October Dr. Dobbs Journal has an interview in which Editor-At-Large Mike Swain talks with Chris Crawford, one of the early Atari game development gurus, about the interactive storytelling paradigm, of which Crawford is the inventor. It gives an exciting glimpse into the possibilities for the future of computer games, and I believe games will play a huge role in the future of healthcare - indispensable for training staff and patients and highly varied in their therapeutic applications as well.