A Coffee Table to Change the World

I think that one of the major barriers to making significant progress in healthcare informatics is the human-computer interface. Healthcare professionals often do not have the time to even learn new interfaces let alone become comfortable enough to embed them in their workflow.

So when I saw Microsoft Surface I immediately began to think of healthcare applications....

Imagine a Doctor and a patient sitting at the table. The Doctor pulls a "book" down from the "shelf" on the display. She thumbs through it, finds the page she wants, turns it around for the patient to look at. The patient puts their PDA on the table and the information transfers to their device for offline reading.

Or suppose a team of radiologists is studying a case. They pull images of a patient up, enlarge and reduce them, change the contrast. Then they drag in reference images from books to compare them against and to help the team make a diagnosis.

If that sounds far fetched take a look at this video from Popular Mechanics