This entry was posted on Monday, April 13th, 2009 at 18:42 and is filed under Technology Bits, justdrew Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
justdrew
Interactive musings from a creative technophile
Technology, but with a human face
It’s important for us (people, that is) to remember that when technology steps in to help us do things better and more efficiently, it’s critical in every sense of the word, that we maintain a connection with what makes us human.
Here’s a great example of how someone (Dr. Yehonatan N. Turner) was brilliant enough to see a simple solution to what could appear to be a purely technical problem. How to improve effectiveness at reading medical scans for cancer detection? Re-connect the human element and remind scanning technicians that they are helping a real person.
Actually, he wanted to reconnect the human element first, but his solution turns out to heighten effectiveness as well.
By including a picture or pictures of a patient with his or her scans, radiologists tended to spend more time and be more thorough in their recommendations. Recent studies confirmed that there is a significant impact, the only question seems to be whether this effect will dull over time or that seeing facial features triggers something in the health professional’s brain.
Keep trying folks, we’ll get this technology::humanity ratio right eventually!
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