As the Georgia Division of Public Health began constructing a systems interface for its syndromic surveillance program, the nature and intended use of these data inspired new approaches to interface design. With the temporal and spatial components of these data serving as fundamental determinants within common aberration detection methods (e.g., Early Aberration Reporting System, SaTScan™), it became apparent that an interface technique that could present a synthesis of the two might better facilitate the visualization, interpretation and analysis of these data.
Typical presentations of data spatially oriented at the zip code level use a color gradient applied to a zip code polygon to represent the differences in magnitude of events within a given region across a particular time span. Typical presentations of temporally oriented data use time series graphs and tabular formats. Visualizations that present both aspects of spatially and temporally rich datasets within a single visualization are noticeably absent.
Objective
This paper describes an approach to the visualization of disease surveillance data through the use of animation techniques applied to datasets with both temporal and geospatial components.