Student project: 
Visualization of Health Records Using Google Earth (TDDC79, Fall 2007)

The short introductory course "Perspectives on Information Technology" TDDC79 is given in the beginning of the first year of the "Master of Science in Information Technology" at Linköping University (in Sweden). Approximately one week of studies was available for implementation in this project work the rest was needed for learning how to search scientific literature, write technical reports etc. The task was to use spreadsheets for "programming" a conversion from a (fake) list of  medical diagnosis and timestamps to at least two different types of visualisations using KML in Google Earth.

The intention of this project is purely an experiment for educational purpose, and we do not believe that these spreadsheet-based examples are suitable for real "production environments". Some of the principles behind this have been discussed in a scientific paper regarding a Google Earth-based prototyping environment for electronic health records.

Tasks and results:
All items below are in Swedish, but formulas in the report and the spreadsheet of course do not require knowledge of Swedish, and the KMZ file should be enjoyable even if you don't understand the texts.

• Task description and starting pointers/hints
• Final report (.pdf)
• Demonstration KML (.kmz), open it in Google Earth (also including some examples of possible future work that probably could be generated from spreadsheets too)
• Spreadsheet that generates the visualisations (.xls) also freely available for viewing online at  http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pei7xv1ldXmzeGpfAOoI8Lw
  Please note that the spreadsheet consists of  four different sheets and the resulting KML snippets is in cell A2 of the last two sheets.

I think the students made and documented a very nice piece of work, especially considering that this is one of their first courses. The students were: Thor Bossuyt, Erik Eloff, Christoffer Johansson, Martin Kristing, Niklas Locking.

Please tell me if you find any interesting use for this information and I'll forward that to the students.

Best regards,
Erik Sundvall (PhD student and supervisor of the project)
http://www.imt.liu.se/~erisu/    Tel: +46-13-227579