LIFELINE

Lifeline

Lifeline

Introduction

LifeLines provide a general visualization environment for personal histories that can be applied to medical and court records, professional histories and other types of biographical data. A one screen overview shows multiple facets of the records. Aspects, for example medical conditions or legal cases, are displayed as individual time lines, while icons indicate discrete events, such as physician consultations or legal reviews. Line color and thickness illustrate relationships or significance, rescaling tools and filters allow users to focus on part of the information. LifeLines reduce the chances of missing information, facilitate spotting anomalies and trends, streamline access to details, while remaining tailorable and easily transferable between applications.

The Life-Line model is based on the premise that teens recover within the context of their families. One of the strongest predictors of positive outcomes for youth after discharging from an intensive treatment program, like Life-Line, is the on-going involvement of the family in treatment. Parent-focused interventions are the most extensively tested and supported form of treatment for youth conduct problems (Sunseri, 2004; Weisz et al., 2004) and have proven promising for substance abuse, ADHD, anxiety, depression, and grief (Hoagwood, Burns, Kiser, Ringeinsen, & Schoenwald, 2001). Life-Line offers family therapy, provided by a licensed therapist who works individually with each family. In addition, Life-line has weekly “open meetings”, at which parents, teens, and siblings participate in therapeutic, multifamily groups to unite the community of families for support and treatment. Life-Line also provides parent weekends to create opportunities for parents to discover their own core treatment issues, their family-of-origin issues, and to establish a united supportive network during the treatment process. Life-Line uses a family focus with all students because the staff are committed to the premise that recovery for the youth will occur in the context of their family.

This general visualization environment is not computationally demanding, requires only high level data descriptions, and can handle a variety of records. Those characteristics make LifeLines a practical example of a personal record format that could be rapidly exchanged or synchronized between multiple services.

The Challenge Of Personal Histories

In order to be a general tool LifeLines have to be able to present different facets of a person's life (medical, financial, education, work, hobbies, legal, etc.). A particular application might use LifeLines for only a subset of those facets. Each facet includes different stories or aspects. For example the medical facet of a person's history might include a 5 years story about their back pain. A famous artist's biography might include facets on painting, writing and influential personalities, its painting facet would then have different aspects such as style and themes. Each story or aspect includes events (e.g. an operation, a police arrest) and periods (e.g. two weeks of acute pain, the blue and pink period in Picasso's biography).

LifeLines present the personal history in a single screen, facets are shown as regions of the screens distinguished by alternating background colors, stories or aspects are lines, periods correspond to changes of size or color along the line, while discrete events ...