Masood Masoodian

Saturnino Luz, Masood Masoodian

The proliferation of consumer health devices such as smart watches, sleep monitors, smart scales, etc, in many countries, has not only led to growing interest in health monitoring, but also to the development of a countless number of ``smart'' applications to support the exploration of such data by members of the general public, sometimes with integration into professional health services. While a variety of health data streams has been made available by such devices to users, these streams are often presented as separate time-series visualizations, in which the potential relationships between health variables are not explicitly made visible. Furthermore, despite the fact that other aspects of life, such as work and social connectivity, have become increasingly digitised, health and well-being applications make little use of the potentially useful contextual information provided by widely used personal information management tools, such as shared calendar and email systems. This paper presents a framework for the integration of these diverse data sources, analytic and visualization tools, with inference methods and graphical user interfaces to help users by highlighting causal connections among such time-series.

Saturnino Luz, Masood Masoodian

We present an application of mosaic diagrams to the visualisation of set relations. Venn and Euler diagrams are the best known visual representations of sets and their relationships (intersections, containment or subsets, exclusion or disjointness). In recent years, alternative forms of visualisation have been proposed. Among them, linear diagrams have been shown to compare favourably to Venn and Euler diagrams, in supporting non-interactive assessment of set relationships. Recent studies that compared several variants of linear diagrams have demonstrated that users perform best at tasks involving identification of intersections, disjointness and subsets when using a horizontally drawn linear diagram with thin lines representing sets, and employing vertical lines as guide lines. The essential visual task the user needs to perform in order to interpret this kind of diagram is vertical alignment of parallel lines and detection of overlaps. Space-filling mosaic diagrams which support this same visual task have been used in other applications, such as the visualization of schedules of activities, where they have been shown to be superior to linear Gantt charts. In this paper, we present an application of mosaic diagrams for visualization of set relationships, and compare it to linear diagrams in terms of accuracy, time-to-answer, and subjective ratings of perceived task difficulty. The study participants exhibited similar performance on both visualisations, suggesting that mosaic diagrams are a good alternative to Venn and Euler diagrams, and that the choice between linear diagrams and mosaics may be solely guided by visual design considerations.