Visualizing symptoms, sensations and stories
By: Katie Mccurdy
Tags: Design, Healthcare, Patient Experience, Healthcare Innovations

Drawing symptoms on a body shape

Some of the most fascinating findings came out of analyzing the body drawings; these represented how someone’s body was feeling when they came to the ER. Here’s what the empty worksheet looked like:

What did we learn?

The color red means pain, heat, injury

I’m going to start with the most obvious one, but it’s worth laying down — you’ll see this over and over through the rest of the examples.

Sharp shapes indicate sharp pain

Especially when combined with a red-orange-yellow color scheme:

Star polygons and lightning bolts combined with red-orange-yellow indicate sharp pain. The lower left image shows swirly patterns inside — perhaps this is meant to be a colon?

This interesting drawing seems to show skewers in the head, along with pain in the left eye. What appears to be a delicious slice of pizza in the middle I’ve just realized is a shining light…so this might be a migraine image.

Radiating lines from a wound mean pain

These lines from two different people’s drawings are emanating from a wound and, combined with the color red, seem to indicate ‘pain.’

Dots showed ‘itching’

These red dots were used to show ‘itchy pain’

Cross-hatching meant ‘tightness’

The image on the left shows cross-hatching on core muscles; the one on the right is showing a tight back/back pain.

People drew both literal and figurative sensations

Some people drew organs, like lungs, on the body. I find this interesting because there are not as many metaphors for the sensation of not being able to breathe; so drawing the lungs is a reasonable way to explain what’s going on.

Both people drew lungs as pink — very literal. The one on the left drew yellow liquid in the lungs.

At other times, people drew a metaphor on the body. Below, the drawing on the left shows a lower back ‘on fire’ and the one on the right shows some kind of striated cube on the lower back (interesting that both of these were on the lower back):

The image on the left shows a lower back cut open with a sharp knife and flames coming out. The cube on the right seems to communicate tightness.

Cool tones helped contrast the area of pain/injury with the rest of the body

Looking at the images together, another trend surfaces; some people tended to color the entire body in a ‘cool’ green or blue hue, to indicate that that part of the body was fine. Cool colors indicate calm, while warm colors were used to show when something was wrong.

Participants had different strategies for visualizing mental state

There are a lot of sensations in the mind that are hard to communicate: confusion, wooziness, lack of concentration, worry. People tend to draw these sensations outside of the body, especially the head. You’ll notice a ‘scribble cloud’ theme below:

Three of the above images show a ‘cloud’ around the head. We see words like woozy, help. The person in the lower left seemed to draw an actual brain (with the left and right hemispheres) combined with the words ‘can’t concentrate on anything else.’

Here two different people drew lines coming out of the head:

The lines seem to indicate a feeling of alarm, worry.

People used facial expressions to communicate mood & sensation

Another way to reflect mental state was to draw expressions:

The person on the left is clearly not happy. The one on the right is happy enough but has a lot of questions.

One patient with arthritis actually drew little faces all over the body shape to indicate how a given part of his body felt:

This is a fascinating way to think about pain. It makes me think — what if people could draw or paint on their actual bodies to show how they were feeling?

Body fluids

One person drew body fluids —both sweat and vomit:

Note the colors — sweat is blue, vomit is green, the wound is red.

UTI similarities

It was fascinating to see how two different drawings of a urinary tract infection; the drawings have different colors but overall are very similar. Both include fever, lower left back pain, and pain while urinating.

It hints at the potential of drawings to assist with diagnosis; what do given conditions ‘look’ like, on average, from a symptom/sensation perspective?