Towards Interactive Visualization of Longitudinal Data to Support Knowledge Discovery on Multi-touch Tablet Computers

A major challenge in modern data-centric medicine is the increasing amount of time-dependent data, which requires efficient user-friendly solutions for dealing with such data. To create an effective and efficient knowledge discovery process, it is important to support common data manipulation tasks by creating quick, responsive and intuitive interaction methods. In this paper we describe some methods for interactive longitudinal data visualization with focus on the usage of mobile multi-touch devices as interaction medium, based on our design and development experiences. We argue that when it comes to longitudinal data this device category offers remarkable additional interaction benefits compared to standard point-and-click desktop computer devices. An important advantage of multi-touch devices arises when interacting with particularly large longitudinal data sets: Complex, coupled interactions such as zooming into a region and scrolling around almost simultaneously is more easily achieved with the possibilities of a multi-touch device than compared to a regular mouse-based interaction device.