On its MSCUI.net website, Microsoft presents a number of interesting ideas around the need for standardizing the graphical user interfaces of medical applications around best practices in complex data visualization. Apart from just showcasing Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, the project seeks to “enable a new generation of safer, more usable and compelling health applications” which seems to aknowledge that a large contributor to today’s low adoption rates of eHealth apps lies in the often unimpressive, static and vastly disparate user interfaces of legacy products. By providing common visual elements across applications, medical professionals should find it easier to orient themselves inside any new application they adopt and achieve a much faster integration with their daily practice. ‘Hit the ground running’ so to speak.
While the concept is praiseworthy, our first impression upon watching this demo video, spotted over on the excellent Medical Quack blog, is that the design may be just a little too futuristic in style to be immediately intuitive, something we felt similarly about when we first saw the Myca interface last year.
In any case we think this is definitely a project worth taking notice of and we look forward to experimenting in this direction in future development. In case you are interested in learning more about this then you may want to visit the Microsoft Connected Health Conference in June.
