Student project: 
Visualization of Health Records Using Google Earth (TDDC79 fall 2008)

The short introductory course "Perspectives on Information Technology" TDDC79 is given in the beginning of the first year of the "Master of Science in Information Technology" at Linköping University (in Sweden). Approximately one week of studies was available for implementation in this project work the rest was needed for learning how to search scientific literature, write technical reports etc. The task was to use spreadsheets for "programming" a conversion from a (fake) list of  medical diagnosis and timestamps to at least two different types of visualisations using KML in Google Earth. 

The intention of this project is purely an experiment for educational purpose, and we do not believe that these spreadsheet-based examples are suitable for real "production environments". Some of the principles behind this have been discussed in a scientific paper regarding a Google Earth-based prototyping environment for electronic health records.
The result from the group of fall 2007 was available to the fall 2008 students.

Tasks and results:

All items below are in Swedish, but formulas in the report and the spreadsheet of course do not require knowledge of Swedish, and the KMZ file should be enjoyable even if you don't understand the texts.

Uppgiftsformulering HT 2008

Hur gör man interaktiva flerdimensionella visualiseringar i Google Earth utifrån tabeller? 
Kalkylprogram (t.ex. Microsoft Excel) kan, om man vill, beskrivas som en enkla deklarativa programmeringsmiljöer med celler istället för rader med programkod. I detta projekt skall ni utgående från tabeller med fiktiv patientjournaldata innehållande tidpunkter, diagnoser m.m. direkt med kalkylprogram skapa minst två olika visualiseringar (t.ex. grafiska tidsaxlar av olika slag) som exporteras till Google Earth. Teori och grundläggande exempel finns tillgängliga. En introducerande lektion inklusive demonstration kommer även kunna ges. Efter projektet kommer ni ha bekantat er med:
* Informationsvisualisering (flerdimensionell)
* Deklarativ "kalkylarksprogramering"
* XML och i synnerhet XML-dialekten KML som används i Google Earth
* Google Earth...

Resultat HT 2008

• Rapport: Visualisering_i_Google_Earth_2008_12_05.pdf
• Google spreadsheet: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pvPTstv4IZpgasJc4aLKCPA
• Demonstration KML (.kmz), open it in Google Earth (also including examples not generated from the spreadsheet)

Comment

I think the students made and documented a nice piece of work, especially considering that this is one of their first courses. The students were: Joel Karlsson, Anna Larsson, Malin Neveryd, Christopher Pettersson, John Törnblom, Mathias Wiberg and Alek Åström

Please tell me if you find any interesting use for this information and I'll try to forward that to the students.

Best regards,
Erik Sundvall (supervisor of the project)
http://www.imt.liu.se/~erisu/    Tel: +46-13-227579