The VoiceViz Project

We are collaborating with Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH), studying, designing and deploying novel technologies for different application areas in digital health. In 2018 GOSH launched DRIVE (Digital Research, Informatics and Virtual Environments), a brand new living lab where novel technology interventions can be investigated and evaluated in a safe environment to see how they might be effectively used by clinicians and patients. The Living Lab can be set up in various ways to enable clinicians, students, families and their sick children (who are about to be released from hospital) to explore and give feedback about future experimental health technologies.

The goal of our collaborative research project to discover new ways of firstly, improving the stay of sick children (and their parents) when in hospital, and, secondly, help clinicians work more effectively with new kinds of recorded patient data. A main motivation is to consider how data can be used more effectively to improve hospital care for children. While there is ever increasing technology available that can be used in hospitals to sense health, little is known as to how the data collected can be best analysed and used by clinicians in terms of informing and improving their practices. It is now possible to collect, store and analyse much more patient data by using IoT and big data technology.

We are developing a novel multi-modal interface called Voiceviz, to help clinicians to understand better patient data by being able to ask new kinds of questions from it, leading to new insights. The system uses a combination of voice and interactive graphical visualisations to make the data more accessible, usable and useful. The aim of the project is to conduct empirical studies of how effective the VoiceViz system is when used in group meetings. Does it encourage more clinicians to voice their opinions and improve the way data is analysed? The project aims to design new visualisation interventions that are being trialled in Great Ormond Street Hospital's DRIVE centre. The focus is to investigate whether this kind of multi-modal method of interaction can democratise data. The overarching goal is to make data analytics more accessible to clinicians so as to empower them.