ISIS: a computer-aided education program for hypertensive patients.
SM Consoli, M Ben Said, J Jean · PubMed · 1994
Hypertension represents a major risk factor and plays a major role in the aggravation of the overall risk of premature cardio-vascular diseases [1, 2]. Unfortunately, statistical findings, reveal a failure among patients, to comply with the therapy [3] and make the health education of hypertensive patients even more necessary. A patient education computer program called ISIS' 2 aimed to be a complementary method to the habitual educational techniques by bringing into patient education the pleasantness of the multimedia. It was developped on a color MacIntosh, using MacPaint, PixelPaint, MacroMind Director and MacRecorder. It runs on MacIntosh II and higher and requires 8 megabytes of RAM, a coprocessor and a color monitor of 13. It takes a 32 megabytes of disk space and is organized into 30 MacroMind Director files or movies. Macros use a high level language (Lingo) to control the navigation between files as well as the patient performance. The movies are made of sequential animations of theatre stages or computer screens. Up to 20 objects or cast-members fill the stage at one time. A spreadsheet facilitates the visualization of the casts-members arrangement into columns and provides additional channels to control the transition aspect and speed, the sound and the macros. Building simple animations is trivial. The clinical information is primarly represented with icons, developed using the guideline design in [4] [5]. ISIS altemates relaxing interludes with educational messages. The patient may navigate through the educational part by selecting one of the six modules: arterial pressure physiology, epidemiology, heart physi-