

Hgraph – Your health in one picture - blueatlas
http://hgraph.org/

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asolove
I'm speechless. I'm going to read the publications in the about page to see
what went into this because, at first glance, it appears to be very poor
information design:

\- The use of a circular arrangement is questionable. Judging the distance of
items from the center along radial axes is not something humans are good at.
And drawing lines between the points adds uninformative visual noise. Better
to just have a little bar chart with consistent axes.

\- All the 'data' is presented without scales, numeric values, or trends over
time. The one overall numeric value is presented without any context. We need
a scale, a min and max, and a population average for this to be remotely
meaningful. My first assumption is that this is like school grades in the US,
where 85 is perhaps normal and 60 is abysmal. Is that right? Will that make
sense to those from countries without grade inflation?

\- The directionality is all messed up. Sleep is bad when it's low, that makes
sense. Nutrition is bad when it's too high? But 'nutrition' is good, right?
It's not clear what 'conditions' and 'environment' are, or how they could be
too low.

\- I would guess that the relative importance of these pieces of information
differs by individual, gender, race, etc. Someone with diagnosed cancer should
be marked as such rather than just being high on 'conditions.' And individuals
with specific diagnosed ailments or family histories should have specific
measures listed more prominently as important predictors.

\- Some information that isn't good or bad but just descriptive belongs on
here, like age, occupation, and, for women, period/pregnancy/menopause status.

~~~
jsonin
Maybe this takes a second glance to understand, I agree.

There are a few dozen ways to present and graph data, that humans can quickly
lock onto. The circular arrangement may or may not be the penultimate method
to visualize health data, but it does afford a few good byproducts like seeing
outliers quickly, identifying potential patterns (if you're looking across
people), etc.

The high-level hGraph with ~18 metrics (we're pretty sure this isn't The Set)
is the galactic view, just to give you an instant sense of your health. Once
you dive into the data, the level of fidelity increases. Think of the Eames
10x10 flick of seeing the universe and then zooming in to get to the atomic
levels that reveal trends, history, etc.

Directionality is how you construct the model (and then interpret it). You can
eat too much. You can live in a hazardous environment (with too little X and
too much Y). You're right that demographics will have a severe impact on
metrics. That bias should be represented in the viz/algorithm.

hGraph needs some TLC from clinicians, policy-makers, and we the patients in
order to get it to the next level.

Check out the screenshots of the health detail displays. If you have
questions, fire away.

-Juhan, juhan@mit.edu, hGraph co-author

~~~
asolove
First let me back up and say, if you have read the research available on the
items below and come to the current design after very careful thought, then I
am just a jerk giving immediate negative feedback on your hard work and I hope
you will forgive me. But if, as I suspect, you have given a lot of thought to
the medical, statistical, and visual side of this, but are not well-read in
the research on information display, I hope my suggestions will be helpful.

\- I would recommend being very careful with the wording. One can have too
much "food" but "nutrition" has positive connotations and no lay person would
speak of "too much nutrition" or "too much environment".

\- Please read the experimental material on information display. People study
these things and polar display is very poor for picking outliers and
recognizing patterns relative to almost any other option, including just
printing numbers next to labels with no graph.

\- For building "interactive" data displays, please read Bret Victor's "Magic
Ink", specifically the section on the evil of requiring interaction to display
information. [1] One of the problems of the circular layout is that 18 is
about as many items as can fit, thus you need interactions to see more data.
With most other displays of this data, you could easily fit far more
information into one, interaction-free display, which could even be printed
out for use in a wider variety of contexts.

\- You could also use the clearer display to show actual numerical labels or
trends over time. (Surely someone with high but declining blood pressure
should appear different than someone with high and increasing blood pressure.)

\- Finally, I am very curious about the decision to include the same set of
metrics for everyone and to display them as a single graph. Some of these
metrics belong together on one scale, some belong on separate scales, some
belong only on people with specific conditions, etc.

\- Are you planning to do a controlled test of this against other high-level
patient summaries? Obviously my guess is that this graph and its interactions
would fare worse than a one-sentence textual description provided by a past
doctor. "Patient is a well-dressed and intelligent elderly man, with a
successful history of controlling his diabetes through diet and exercise, but
still showing signs of hypertension" seems to me much better than a graph with
conditions: red that requires zooming in to see the word "diabetes" and LDL
right on the edge that requires zooming in to see a declining trend over time.

[1]
[http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/#interactivity_considered_har...](http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/#interactivity_considered_harmful)

~~~
jsonin
Thanks. I'm familiar with the material. We have run several micro-studies with
real clinicians and real patients with excellent results. Could it be better?
Hell yes. Give it a whirl asolove, give it a whirl.

~~~
asolove
Well then awesome. Thanks for making things better!

(And yes, I did try it. Didn't turn out great for me, but I have a variety of
fun medical problems I wouldn't expect to see covered here.)

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spodek
That graph isn't one picture. It's a lot of pictures that they fit together.
When you zoom in you get different pictures.

I see these circle/star plots sometimes but don't see the advantage over bar
charts in conveying information or meaning. Am I missing something that a
circle of dots adds that a line of bars or dots doesn't?

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trurl42
[http://hgraph.org/images/hgraph_manualinput_v02.jpg](http://hgraph.org/images/hgraph_manualinput_v02.jpg)

This looks awful. Why would want to do a polar plot for a time series?

Just so you can rotate it with your finger to go back in Time?

~~~
eps
This doesn't look _awful_ and by a very large margin. Unconventional - maybe,
awful - heck, no. This is as easy to interpret as linear version.

~~~
trurl42
I find it a lot harder to interpret.

You can't really make out the rate of change if it's not linear.

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showsover
I find it disturbing that everyone in the demo has a shortage on sleep. Which
is the same for most (if not all) of my colleagues. They all sleep (much) too
little for it to be healthy.

Sleep and excercise are easily forgotten or given up when 'free time' gets
harder to achieve, while both have so many benefits (or rather, none of the
disadvantages that too little of both have).

~~~
dragons
>> I find it disturbing that everyone in the demo has a shortage on sleep

Looks like it's a family with a baby in the household?

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rsobers
Neat interface design, but probably its more useful to have this information
in a spreadsheet. The visuals actually obscure the data, IMO.

~~~
eswat
True, but I wouldn’t doubt most facilities already have this information in a
spreadsheet.

I believe hGraph is just taking a stab at presenting this data in a different
way, one that could be more useful to patients that shudder at the thought of
having to look at a spreadsheet.

If good explanations are shown along with the factors and questionable factors
– such as weight – have enough context, this could be more than just a neat
way to show the health of someone.

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eps
What the hell is wrong with everyone? This is (a) interesting (b) unusual (c)
clearly has a lot of thought and effort put into it. And all you can muster is
"It's so shitty, I'm speechless"? Not a sliver appreciation and empathy. The
hell, guys?

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drcode
Yeah, why can't people just use diplomatic platitudes instead of giving their
real opinion. /s

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gtaylor
I'm a little confused by the standard values they've chosen for exercise and
weight. It looks like even the guy with three hours a week spent exercising
got knocked into the red, and the lady weighing in at 112 lost points as well.
Both of these can be perfectly acceptable/good values, depending on the nature
and intensity of the exercise and the body type/build for the weight.

How is this thing making a determination on healthy weight without taking into
account other factors like height, age, build, etc?

~~~
benwa02
Right now we are only doing a split on adult female/male but we realize that
is not perfect. The next incarnation needs to include what you list because
"healthy" varies.

Thanks for your feedback!

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bnegreve
"Sir, you're a bit low on drugs and alcohol" :)

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simbolit
who created the scoring metric and what is the basis for that?

when i go to [0] and change the default 3 drinks a week to 0 drinks a week my
score drops from 100 to 90, that is a full 10%. Why? Acetaldehyde and acetic
acid, both metabolites of ethanol are rather potent toxins. I would expect a
better rating from keeping toxins out of my body, not a worse one. Then i
changed the number of cigarettes from 0.5 a day to 0 a day. Nothing changed.
Not smoking surely is much better from a health perspective than smoking 3-4
cigarettes each week.

I simply don't get it.

[0] [http://www.hscoremixer.org/](http://www.hscoremixer.org/)

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notahacker
There are some large studies that suggest, counter-intuitive as it may seem,
that not drinking alcohol at all seems to have negative side effects on
health. It _could_ be down to badly chosen sample populations or ineffective
weighting for existing conditions, socioeconomic groups or race, but there is
some support for a theory that some units of some forms of alcohol might have
positive effects on some groups of humans. And the 0.5 cigarettes a day seems
to be a threshold, albeit perhaps too high.

I'm more alarmed by the way the score drops if you weigh less than 258 lbs...
especially with a 32.5 inch waistline.

Edit: there are some neat sliders on that page you can move the "optimum"
values and green ranges for acceptable scores on the graphs on the left hand
side to develop a saner scoring system.

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somberi
In the demo, is all the bounciness necessary? Does it have to zoom when I
click on any of the dots? Why not just show me the data when I mouse over? The
zoom does not give me anything new. May be you have good reasons, just my 2
cents.

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aabalkan
Neat design indeed. I believe there's a room for design in health reporting
for patients so they can understand the situation better. Did you submit this
design to Dribbble? I think designers can learn from your work.

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bcheung
I tried the online link version. Apparently it's not good that I don't drink
any alcohol and I'm not in any pain. Those are considered to be outside the
range of "healthy".

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hackula1
For some reason it is saying that my ideal weight is 265, which is about 100
pounds to many. Also, it says I should be exercising 27 hrs/wk. 4 hours of
exercise per day seems unreasonable.

~~~
benwa02
Right.

You can manipulate what is "healthy" (min/max) in the chart by editing the end
points of the green zone on the left hand side.

On the right hand side you can input your values for each metric to see it
plotted on the hGraph circle + get a score.

Feel free to submit what you think is healthy in the bottom right.

Thanks for the feedback!

Eric

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koof
"Steal" is probably not a word you want associated with a health information
product, no?

~~~
gault8121
Yeah you should use the word "reuse" or "share". Steal is counter to the idea
of open source.

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GotAnyMegadeth
When I click on participate, nothing happens...

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highphive
For me, it popped open an email to them in outlook. Not exactly what I was
expecting or what I wanted.. I couldn't figure out how to make my own graph...

~~~
benwa02
Howdy,

If you'd like to play with hGraph check out a tool we made during development.

[http://hscoremixer.org/](http://hscoremixer.org/)

We created this tool for physicians to give us feedback on the engine that
drives hGraph. You can define what is considered "healthy" and rank each
metric's importance in your overall health.

Put in your numbers and see how healthy you are.

Eric

~~~
andyhmltn
What's the logic behind the alcohol part in this? Mine goes red when I change
it from 4 drinks a week to 1... surely the latter is healthier? :)

Great design by the way!

~~~
benwa02
Yes, some of these are a bit unreasonable in the tool. ... but we really want
you to drink! ;)

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kimonos
Very interesting!

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kentf
Looks amazing!

