Hector G. Parra

At 3:58, this song by Ulver describes my life at the moment. I...

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 22:08:46 -0800

At 3:58, this song by Ulver describes my life at the moment.

I remember walking, one side of town to the other
Alone one night in January… or February
It’s like in an old movie from some other land
It lasted for hours

Only streelights
And the grating of gravel in pedestrian subways

I remember some trees which stood black and naked
Weatherbeaten hollows of snow
With sparse lumps of ice,
Been scraped off by the wind alone
And on the stairs before I left
One of the girls had surprisingly given me a kiss
Stung in the cold long after

Beautiful poster by Joey Roth

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 13:08:47 -0700

Beautiful poster by Joey Roth

He took a two hour lunch. Player. Benjamin Franklin’s Daily...

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 00:05:47 -0700

He took a two hour lunch. Player. Benjamin Franklin’s Daily Schedule

Mockup for a Health Education Tool

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 02:12:00 -0700

A couple of summers ago I was asked to prototype an Integrated Health Education / Registration-Visit Information Intake Tool for a couple of local community health clinics. My undergraduate ninjas at the time, Allen Luo & Jakkree Janchoi, helped flush out the design, with Allen finalizing and mocking it up. Basically, an incoming patient will receive a smart tablet and be able to watch health related videos. In the back, the data on videos seen can be communicated to the doctor, or the doctor can recommend videos for the patient to see. In user story terms:

Doctor observes patient’s interests in health education
- User Interface gathers statistics on media consumed (Figure 1)
- Statistics on media consumed may alert the doctor to address a particular topic (Figure 2)
Patient receives recommended health education
- Doctors may examen medical records to recommend topics (Figure 3)
- Artificial Intelligence may examen medical records to recommend topics (Figure 4)

It was a good idea. Unfortunately, the proposal died as that: a proposal. As usual, when dealing with public and non-profit entities the “no money” card always flies up. (Well, it was more complicated than that…) This blog post is basically documentation of the work that we did, particularly Allen’s great implementation of my chicken scratch designs.

This was pre-iPad. This would probably look different with iOS specific UI. After all, iPad would be the way to go for something like this. A question I would have these days: would the video recommended to you, or data on the videos you watched fall under HIPAA?

Figure 1: A mockup of the media selection library.

Figure 2: A mockup of a recommendation resulting from a patient’s media consumption log

Figure 3: Doctor can recommend a particular video “prescription”

Figure 4: A mockup of a recommendation resulting from a patient’s EMR

Figure 5: “Patient” watching a video :)

Simplistic 256x256 WorkFlowy icon I made to use with Fluidium. I...

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 16:47:00 -0700

Simplistic 256x256 WorkFlowy icon I made to use with Fluidium. I wish I knew graphic design tools to make something proper!

"Am I being productive or am I just being busy?"

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 14:01:44 -0800

“Am I being productive or am I just being busy?”

- Timothy Ferriss

What Happens When You Charge a Customer’s Card?

Sun, 27 Feb 2011 03:32:30 -0800

What Happens When You Charge a Customer’s Card?

"If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late."

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 14:59:49 -0800

“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”

- Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn. Source: Don’t suck twice.

I wonder what the proper way to enforce this would be.

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 16:10:13 -0800

I wonder what the proper way to enforce this would be.

Poster I presented today at Medicine Meets Virtual Reality 18....

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 22:56:06 -0800

Poster I presented today at Medicine Meets Virtual Reality 18. It was definitely the most colorful one there.

I’ve heard of guerrilla marketing, but this is ridiculous.

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 09:15:04 -0800

I’ve heard of guerrilla marketing, but this is ridiculous.

Gathering Requirements for a Personal Health Management System...

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 23:09:35 -0800

Gathering Requirements for a Personal Health Management System (Full-Res)

Academic Posters: Breaking the Rules

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 22:58:00 -0800

I was asked by my colleague a few weeks ago to create a poster for our (his really) Work-In-Progress submission to CHI 2011. I obviously agreed, but soon found myself feeling restricted. Most posters I’ve seen suck. They’re boring, contain too much text, and don’t have any color. They all seem to follow the tired ABSTRACT, METHODS, DATA, CONCLUSION format. So instead of fighting this, I threw it all out and developed something I could really call my own.

Hector’s Poster:

I think it’s fairly straight forward and to the point. Concepts are modularized, labeled, and directed. And it’s nice on the eyes. Unfortunately, it wasn’t submitted.

Colleague’s Poster:

My colleague submitted his version instead. I’ll let it speak for itself. His reasoning:

I Really liked what you did for the poster but I chose mine because 1) it conformed better to what I think is expected, and 2) didn’t feel liking adding a lot of text to yours.

So my question is: What exactly is expected? Conformity? The only requirements CHI makes regarding a poster is its dimensions. They say nothing else. Wouldn’t ACM CHI, the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, be the most accepting venue for this sort of thing? Needless to say, I am disappointed with his decision. I’m going to print this poster out anyway. It’s probably the last academic writing I will ever do. HGP

Yet another life organization helper: WorkFlowy

Mon, 10 Jan 2011 12:58:28 -0800

Yet another life organization helper: WorkFlowy

How to read some of the stranger codes on US diplomatic cables.

Sun, 19 Dec 2010 02:06:19 -0800

How to read some of the stranger codes on US diplomatic cables.

Association for Computing Machinery, Cal State Long Beach -...

Wed, 08 Dec 2010 17:56:32 -0800

Association for Computing Machinery, Cal State Long Beach - December 8, 2010

“(Charles M. Blow) used Gallup’s data to chart religiosity...

Thu, 02 Dec 2010 01:20:17 -0800

“(Charles M. Blow) used Gallup’s data to chart religiosity against gross domestic product per capita, and to group countries by their size and dominant religions.”

Communicating Medical Lab Data

Thu, 02 Dec 2010 00:55:00 -0800

This is how we should communicate medical lab data: so it can be understood. This particular design for Prostate-specific Antigen was by JUNG + WENIG, and was my favorite of the three, particularly because theirs included a clearly labeled sequence for digesting the information. Designs were commissioned by Wired for their The Blood Test Gets a Makeover article.

On an ironic side note, The NNT states that 100% of PSA test subjects received no benefit from the test, and that 20% were actually harmed due to false-positives. Yikes. HGP

Wireless Health: Transforming Healthcare with Technology

Wed, 01 Dec 2010 23:24:09 -0800

The Center for Research on IT and Organizations (CRITO) and the Center for Health Care Management and Policy (CHCMP), both at UC Irvine, teamed up to deliver this excellent conference that covered many aspects of new health today. It’s definitely one of the better conferences I’ve been to.

Interesting people and things mentioned:

Dr. Eric Topol of Scripps Health tweets about wireless health monitoring, personal genomics, and how these will change medicine. He’s a great presenter too. Check him out @EricTopol.
Research from MIT shows that your social network is capable of changing your health behaviors. Original work was published in Science.
DNA Transistors mentioned as a World Changing Idea by Scientific American.
The Number Needed to Treat (NNT) is a powerful tool to communicate benefit and harm that both patients and doctors can understand. The number of treatments that don’t benefit us is shocking!
Jitterbug is a phone aimed at seniors. The company is venturing into all sorts of health services and monitoring. Originally conceived by the inventor of the mobile phone, Marty Cooper. (Check out this mostly unrelated, but awesome interview he did with CSPAN)

Questions I wanted to ask, but didn’t get an chance to:

If preventative health will be consumer-driven, how do we create demand? Many chronic disease sufferers are apathetic or ignorant to the the harmful effects of their illness. Technology has been shown to influence behavior, but how do we expect these consumers to understand this need before they buy?
How do medical and health device companies expect to merge systems and solutions if their products continue to use propriety and/or undocumented systems for data exchange and storage? It’s my data. Let me access it how I want and send it where I want to!

This conference, along with some other recent events, have shown me I prefer pen to paper for most of my activities! I’ll take better notes next time. HGP

A MoMA-like, iMovie-induced kernel panic. Due to the rendering...

Sun, 28 Nov 2010 15:44:00 -0800

A MoMA-like, iMovie-induced kernel panic. Due to the rendering buffer the typical panic modal wouldn’t display.