Terry E Weymouth, Charles Meyer, Atul Prakash, Thomas Finholt, Ronald Adler, Michael D. Cohen, Timothy Plecher, Karen Erhardt-Domino; University of Michigan.
In this project we will develop a testbed which will support collaboration in using medical images for diagnosis. The collaboration will be between the primary health care physicians and health care specialists.
We will explore, develop, implement and test a toolkit for collaboration which involves the viewing of images and video over a distance. This will be based in a prototype testbed to support remote healthcare linking primary care facilities with a world-class hospital: The University of Michigan Medical Center.
The project will simultaneously adress issues on three fronts: the development of new collaboration technology, the development of a toolkit for a medical application domain, and the systematic evaluation of the effect of the introduction of collaboration technology on the current practice of consulting. These three aspects of the study reenforce each other: the development of new technologies and their underlying principles is informed by the needs of users in an application area; the social science studies provide clear methods to probe and define user needs; the introduction of a new technology provides an oppertunity to study of the effects of technology on a working group, and the medical community gets a new set of tools.
In addition to the research on collaboration using images and voice, this project is an extension and futher verificaiton of the collaboration technology developed for scientific collaboration in the UARC Project.
We will be employing a rapid prototyping strategy that is integral to the study of the user community and to the research,. development and deployment of the toolkit. This approach puts actual working systems into the hands of the users in the early stages of the project and maintains a closely coupled and frequent cycle of user feedback, responsive redesign and systematic evaluation. In previous practice, this cycle had a period of about six months. The research is driven by the underlying principles the emerge in close examination of the user needs; and the resulting tools are deployed in a timely fashion.
Because of the close interaction among research, application development, and user evaluation, we will employ a team style of management. While daily operations in the project are in the hands of the PI (as program manager), project directions are reviewed and revised by a committee (consisting of the project CO-PIs) which will meet on a regular basis.