If you haven’t been following all of my CES Digital Health coverage, you might want to check out some of the following articles:
Initial CES 2015 Observations
Wearables Explosion at CES 2015
A Video Look at the Digital Health, Fitness and Wellness Section of CES 2015
A Look at Digital Health at CES 2015
While I was mostly focused on the Digital Health section of CES, I also took note of a number of new user interface approaches that various companies were demoing at CES. Since it’s CES, some of these are still conceptual, but they got my EHR UI thoughts going.
Finger Mouse
The Motix Touch Mouse was one of the most intriguing new user interfaces I’ve ever seen in the 10 years I’ve been attending CES. Your hands basically stay on the keyboard and a motion capture device follows your finger which works like a mouse on screen. It was a really interesting evolution of the mouse. Unfortunately, they didn’t have a great form example which would replicate the EHR world in which I live. So, I’m not sure how well this finger mouse would work filling out the long forms that many have in their EHR. However, the concept was really intriguing to consider.
Here’s a video demo of the Motix Touch Mouse:
3D Rudder
The 3D Rudder really blew my mind when I tried it out. I’m not exactly sure of its application in the EHR and healthcare IT world, but the experience of controlling your computer with your feet was really amazing. Plus, the foot control was able to work in 3 dimensions which made it really unique. It took me a second to learn, but I’d love the new way to look at how an input control could work.
You can see the 3D Rudder’s Indiegogo campaign, and here’s a video demo of the 3D Rudder:
While the mouse and keyboard have been tremendously powerful input devices for computers, I’m fascinated to consider how the evolution of computer input will go. We’ve seen the amazing growth of voice and touch over the past couple years. However, I think and hope we’re just getting started with how simple it will be to control the computers of the future. I believe the small innovations like the two mentioned above are part of the process of improving computer UIs as we know them.
