Human Computer Interaction - or Relationship?

I’m sitting in the therapeutic Nevada sunshine working on my Seasonal Affective Disorder this weekend. I’ll let you know on Monday morning whether its working out the way I would hope…

So far, I've watched a brand new Corvette get totaled in a tire wall. (No physical injuries - just financial.) I have one front wheel bearing that went bad and needed replacing. But the sunshine definitely beats the grey skies and slushy snow on the ground back in Montana.

In my day job, I hear a lot from physicians about how much the "story" about a patient means. We're all about the narrative.

But, the quest to turn everything about the patient into structured data has given us the EHR we have today that is heavily infiltrated with small square text boxes, pick lists and mouseclicks. We now have a competing ideology that promises to deliver us from that Purgatory (Hell?) through the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) that will extract structured data from our unstructured musings. We'll see how that works out...

But, what about the inverse of that paradigm? What if, instead of looking at graphs and dashboards of all that structured data, the computer just told you what was going on?

Well, that would be Natural Language Generation (NLG) and that is probably one more component of the human-computer interaction puzzle.

Here is a 15 minute podcast that you might find interesting.

The company website is probably worth a click or two as well.

(I guess if I was a patient attached to a bunch of sensors, I could just login to MyChart and ask the computer to tell me what was going on... and skip the appointment altogether.)

My boss shared this recent article that takes a bit more nuanced view of human computer relationship from (of all places...) The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities at Oxford University.

Maybe our exploration of the relationship we are going to develop with our machines is just beginning?

Finally, something to ponder for all of the Narcissists out there looking to have a drone "entourage" in the future.

Have a great weekend!

Randale