PICU Without Walls

PICU (Pediatric Intensive Care Unit) Without Walls is a Children’s Hospital initiative, under the direction of Dr. Jeffrey Burns, to bring pediatric intensive care resources to anyone, in anyplace across the world.

Dr. Burns and Children’s Hospital enlisted IBM Interactive to help bring this initiative from a vague concept to actual execution, and I’m proud to have been a User Experience Designer and Software Engineer on this complex, data-centric software application and soon-to-be platform called Amphitheater. For the initial pilot, a small team of four (including myself) designed and developed the application based around respiratory illness. The project has now been elevated to IBM Smarter Planet status, and the next release will be the first commercial use of IBM Watson technology. A role-based application, anyone has the ability to sign-up and connect with doctors, nurses and other users to share information, ask questions and get answers in real time. As an Adobe AIR application, programmed using the Flex framework, mxml, and Actionscript 3.0, the application has the ability to connect online and offline so that users can download updates, additional content and use the application with an intermittent internet connection. Since the pilot was deployed in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, with an expected max internet connection of a 56K dial-up modem, the ability to use the app offline was a necessary requirement.

Various modules exist in the application including an eLearning video module in which a user can post questions at any point in the video’s timeline. Users can see points displayed where questions or comments occur in the scrub bar, and as the playhead progresses, a scrolling list of user posts appears on the right-hand side.

This particular pilot also launched with a ventilator simulator to teach doctors and others how to properly operate a ventilator.

We also worked with the team from healthmap.org to integrate their API into the application, which shows where and what outbreaks have occurred in the world.

Dr. Burns was invited to IBM Impact in April 2011 to speak about the project. His talk is presented below.