Lifelines: Visualizing
Personal Histories
Class overview
Jen Golbeck
04 Feb 02
Background
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LifeLines: Visualizing Personal Histories
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Catherine Plaisant, Ben Shneiderman,
Brett Milash, Ann Rose, Seth Widoff
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University of Maryland College Park
Human Computer Interaction Lab
LifeLines: Purpose
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Purpose: Visualize information about a person over
time in one screen
Show overview with access to details about each
item
Provide quick access to important data which
would otherwise need to be hand sorted
Appearance
Purpose
Should be able to spot…
 Trends
 Critical Incidents
 Cause-effect
Anyone “who must
relationships
make a decision about
 Previous actions
an individual based on a
…all to get the “big
thorough understanding
picture”
of past events”
Designed for...
 Medical and Legal
professions
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Previous Research 1
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Tufte
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
“Graphical Summary of patient status”, The Lancet,
344:8919 (August 6, 1994). 386-389.
Tufte, “Graphical summary…”
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Objective: To develop a graphical summary of patient status that overlays the traditional medical record and is
designed to facilitate patient care rather than administrative, regulatory, financial, or legal needs.
Design: A richly detailed, one-page summary of patient status suitable for high-resolution computer display or laser
printer. All numerical data are plotted using small repeated graphs to help reveal the time course of the patient's
illness and response to treatment. Progress notes and stamp-sized medical images are also included.
Methods: All findings and treatments are scaled individually based on reference values, recommended drug dosages,
and clinical judgement to allow display on a uniform vertical axis. A non-linear time scale compresses years of data
into a context allowing one to assess recent trends. The most recent numerical values are also printed above each
graph. All words and numbers are displayed in Bitstream Bell Centennial, a compact and legible typeface.
Results: A sample graphical summary of one particularly long and complex patient illness involving both medical
and psychiatric illnesses was created. The data from a 5 cm thick medical record were extracted into a 24 by 484
flowsheet (11,616 cells containing 1786 individual values). These data were graphically summarized and displayed
legibly on a single page.
Conclusion: The graphical summary of patient status maps findings and treatments over time. The high-resolution
display allows the clinician to 1) assess relationships between findings and treatments and 2) consider alternative
diagnostic and management strategies. The graphical summary illustrates how clinicians' needs for accessible and
interpretable patient information can be met from an electronic medical record designed to meet legal and
administrative needs.
Comments: Intuitively, it would seem that a one page graphical summary of an entire medical chart would be
immensely useful. This must be subjected to rigorous scientific evaluation to see
Previous Research 2
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Plaisant, Shneiderman
“Scheduling Home Control Devices: design
issues and usability evaluation of four
touchscreen interfaces.” Int. J ManMachine Studies, 26 (1992), 375-393.
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Showed that for scheduling devices in the
home, timelines are quickly understood and
used for data entry
Previous Research 3
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Shneiderman
with Jog:
Starfield displays (discussed by Cassie?)
with Kandogan:
Elastic Windows
Elastic windows, with improved spatial layout and rapid multi-window operations, are an
effective alternative to current window management strategies for efficient personal role
management]. Multi-window operations are achieved by issuing operations on window groups
hierarchically organized in a space-filling tiled layout.
Applications 1

Juvenile Justice Youth Record
– Provide information to case workers about
youthful offenders
– Current status and case history
– Improve current system which uses many
screens and cryptic codes
Applications 2
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Medical Records
– Provide a one screen overview with details on
demand of patient history
– Show conditions, treatments, allergies, and
history
– Improve speed of knowledge acquisition over
current visit-by-visit records which are not
connected, may be missing information, and do
not show connections
Interface Design 1
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Show data in timeline format
– Encode information using color and icons
– Highlight relationships between periods
– Use graphical information to indicate
magnitude (ie thickness of line to indicate
severity of offense; shade of color to indicate
severity of illness)
Interface Design 2
Allow user to…
 Focus on or zoom to any period or event
 Collapse or expand categories of
information (i.e. diagnoses, medication,
hospitalizations) - elastic windows
 Show further details for any item
Contributions 1
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Information Architecture (1998)
– Create links
– Map data attributes to visual attributes
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LifeLines vs Tabular and Graphical
– Show that LifeLines facilitates faster analysis
of data than other forms
Contributions 2
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Communicating Time-Oriented, Skeletal
Plans to Domain Experts Lucidly, Proc of
the 10th Int’l Conf on Database and Expert
Systems Appliactions (DEXA99)
Strengths and Weaknesses
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Strength - New, innovative and effective
method for visualizing a lot of interrelated
and complex information
Weakness - no method for data conversion
or input