cullmanndesign blog

If you design or develop for any of the web, iPhone or iPad LiveView is a must-have app. Essentially a screencasting tool, it allows the user to place a “virtual” device on their host mac and share that marque view with an iPad or iPhone via WiFi. Great tool, genius idea. John Hicks has posted a video that does the product justice.

Quick demonstration of how LiveView works from Jon Hicks on Vimeo.

The popularity of user interface designs like the iPod Touch, iPhone and MicroSoft Surface have created a demand to carry that experience into other arenas of user interaction. At the core of the user experience is “multitouch”. Multitouch allows a user to position multiple digits on a touch-screen device simultaneously for manipulating on-screen environments. This requires a few advancements in hardware and software since most modern user interface design is based on the idea of a single point-of-engagement.

Multitouch user interfaces are not a silver-bullet for user interface design. It’s a very good solution for hand-held devices like a smart-phone, but not a strong solution for navigating current computer user interfaces. Multitouch’s best applications can be found in large-scale or shared user experiences like screens at a convention or public space. Multitouch, when paired with a suitable application can allow user to navigate and organize large amount of information quickly. It can also allow multiple users to share a large-scale screen like those found at conventions or public-forums.

Andrew Trice of Cynergy Systems, has posted a video clip of a custom solution using Flex, Windows 7 and a consumer-market touchscreen device from HP. Great demo that leverages currently available technology and next-generation ideas.

The next generation of iPhone software will change the medical hardware market.

Apple announced that they will be releasing the 3rd generation of iPhone software this week to developers. This is has become an annual announcement and clearly a large update with functionality improvements including copy and paste, search, stereo bluetooth and file sharing. Many of these new features had been a long-time coming and had been anticipated. A significant improvement, and one that I am most intrigued by, is the opening of the iPhone hardware to application developers. Developers can now build software and design hardware to add functionality to the iPhone hardware and extend the device into a much more flexible platform. This is of course, pending Apple’s approval of any new device and wear the label “Made for iPod“. This is a change in position for Apple and an opportunity for anyone looking to improve and extend the usability of the 17 million iPhones and iPod touches in the hands of the public today.

The Glucose Meter market is based on inexpensive, flash rom based devices that calculate glucose levels with a small blood sample and save the result. Not an elegant solution, but one that makes life more livable for millions of people. One of the demonstrations during the iPhone keynote announcement was a small piece of hardware that can be paired with the iPhone to read glucose levels in the same way as these devices. It also extends the functionality of these devices by logging the entries, charting trends and providing a method to back this data up for future reference.

The iPhone represents an improvement over the traditional, single-use device. An improvement that uses expandable, up-date-able and customizable software to adapt to changes rather than relying on the patients to input and calculate their persona<span></span>l data. A software model for these types of solutions can be infinitely more flexible then those solutions bound to single-function devices. This does not promise to (or should attempt to) relieve a patient of their personal responsibility of health, but rather takes the arduous process of logging and tracking their condition manually, or worse, estimating records when in discussion with a healthcare professional.

Most important, the use of a software-based solutions, like the one provided by the iPhone platform, presents an elegant answer to patient needs and a new avenue of products that patients will be able to take advantage of: contextual information and patient support. By tethering a health-monitoring device to one that can access the internet, patients are immediately able to access information about the severe or benign return on their test, information is results from a test are outside norms or if they require fast reference to adverse events or unique physical reactions. This information would also be accessible within the context of the specific device that they are using. A particular brand of blood pressure monitor for instance, can employ an application with information about their specific medication, how that medication may react,and provide more alerts if the medication is mixed with food or other medications. All of this (ideally) available within 1-2 clicks from a test results screen.

I do not believe that the iPhone offers a silver-bullet to the problems discussed. In fact, the closed-platform that Apple offers, the expense of the iPhone and cellular data plans, and the slow adoption of mobile internet devices in general, make such a solution impractical for the general public. The solution I am recommending is the extending of devices that are designed to help improve the quality of patients lives. I believe that the generation currently coming into their late teens and early twenties will not accept the limitations of devices that are not networked or will log information. Their lives (and the lives of many people of all ages) are now life-cast as habit and their data, protected of course, will need to be recordable. Microsoft and Google are currently developing separate architectures for the storage and use of online medical records for just such a purpose. The public’s adoption of these technologies, has been luke-warm to date, but both platforms are in their infancy.

The need for “smart” devices is evident and the popularity of the iPhone, Apple’s newly released software and the want for companies to make their products more effective will quickly fuel the next generation of software and hardware solutions.