Visual Analytics for Public Health: Supporting Knowledge Construction and Decision-Making

Massive and complex data impose a challenge on the public health community to explore, analyze, and synthesize valuable information to make timely informed decisions. This study exploits the use of Visual Analytics (VA) to enable health professionals to understand heterogeneous injury data and decide about dynamic health situations. Visual Analytics is defined as the "science of analytical reasoning facilitated by interactive visual interface"[14]. We conducted collaborative Paired and Group Analytics sessions to examine how VA assists health professionals in investigating injury data as well as in supporting knowledge construction and decision-making. This manuscript reports how stakeholders perceived VA to be usefulness in helping them understand the injury data, get insights and build knowledge that could potentially prompt actions into critical health situations. Future study implications can inform the design of innovative VA tools and techniques that synthesize novel collaborative VA approaches to optimize the decision-making process.