Kazuo Nakazawa

Generating Graphical Reports on Cardiac Catheterization

Electronic medical recording systems [1-4] have become widespread due to the improve‐ ment in hardware performance and user interfaces. Some recent systems are designed to support doctor–patient communication using a tablet PC [5-6]. However, usability is still an issue and medical professionals need more such user-friendly interfaces. To make these sys‐ tems accessible to inexperienced users and to reduce the overhead of data entry, we have been developing various pen-based electronic medical recording systems [7-8]. Pen-based computing is an active research area for both user interfaces and computer graphics. Our work is based on recent advances in this area, especially the freeform user interfaces pro‐ posed by Igarashi [9]. Using this approach, the user draws freehand lines on the screen as‐ sisted by the system, and the result is directly stored as a vector image. Our systems feature special purpose functions for pen input including three-dimensional (3D) sketching, useridentification, and handwritten character recognition and search [8]. They are designed to help medical professionals to think more freely when working on difficult problems without being constrained by cumbersome interfaces.

A Web-Based Stroke Education Application for Older Elementary Schoolchildren Focusing on the FAST Message

It is necessary to identify the symptoms of a transient ischemic attack (TIA) quickly and provide treatment at special medical facilities to prevent stroke. All family members need to learn stroke signs. Specialists are spreading the face, arm, speech, time (FAST) message for identifying typical TIA symptoms to teens as part of stroke education activity in schools. To support these activities, we developed stroke education for older elementary schoolchildren outside of a school environment using information and communication technology. We utilized HTML5 and JavaScript to make a web-based application using on the FAST message. We provided an example of our application program at an event held at the National Cerebral and Cardiovascular Center in Japan, 2014. On average, 83 % of older children answered questions about the FAST message correctly. Our application might be useful as a stroke education support tool.