Visualizing big data in a 'health portrait' 

The eternal question: how do you make data insights appealing to the less-than-techy brain? It’s a riddle that Genae and Duke & Grace were able to solve with the help of 28 questions, a few facial expressions and a colorful 3D artwork. Together, we gave Genae as well as E-Capture, now known as Staicy, a new look. The icing on the cake? We created an innovative online experience for Staicy that proves that data software can be a real treat for the eye!

Genae, who now joined the IQVIA healthcare family, was a Belgian company that assisted producers of medical devices (implants, prostheses …) in putting up and completing clinical research, approving medical devices, defining market strategy in accordance with regulations and managing quality control during the development stage. That’s quite a job!

Clinical research involves a large amount of data from patients, doctors and nurses to process, and with a lot of data comes a great deal of responsibility - it takes a brave (and insightful!) person to manage it. For this exact reason, Genae developed Staicy, ingenuous and comprehensible data management software, that doesn’t require extensive insider knowledge. In an earlier stage, Duke & Grace helped to put together the design and the identity of the platform. Now, we helped to bring it on the B2B market and thus create worldwide awareness.

 

From health data to art

The challenge? Looking for ‘stopping power’ at Genae’s booth during medical conferences. As data management software isn’t exactly the best icebreaker that would lead to an engaging conversation, the main challenge was to capture the attention of the medical conference’s attendees. Handing out another pen or tote bag wasn’t going to do the trick. We needed something that really made an impact. That left us with the question: what sparks a human brain’s curiosity? The answer was fairly straightforward: personalized experiences! That’s how we came up with a unique 3D-generated ‘health portrait’, based on their personal information. Enter a colorful sphere! Science became art and art became science.

Who dares to claim that big data can't be beautiful?

 

The making of the online experience for Staicy

How the spheres were built, you ask? It was a fairly intuitive process: all questions were matched with a value that, depending on the individual’s answers, displayed a positive or negative impact on the user’s health profile and biological age. These values were then matched with different paint layers, virtual filters and displacement maps on the sphere.

Due to the vast amount of variables in the input, every participating user is presented with a colorful 3D sphere that is fully unique to their personal health. Every graphic element on the sphere represents an answer to a question in the questionnaire. For example, the more water the user drinks, the bluer the sphere turns out. The movement speed and turning radius directly correspond to the movement habits and sports the user practises. The user’s biological sex also plays a role: while men are presented with a color palette that favors green shades, women are presented with a heavily red-colored palette. To make all this happen, Duke & Grace called upon the programming language WebGL and the VR framework A-frame.

“We started from a basic structure, 2D paintings, to which we applied various textures, and then 'glued' them onto the sphere. Each sphere also had to be personal, and therefore dynamic. For the various parameters, such as smoking and eating salty, we wrote the code ourselves. Next, everything was carefully programmed with a language that can render 3D objects in a browser.”

Koen Vinken

Software Engineer at Duke & Grace

The icing on the cake? During one of our hackathons, we also developed an additional AR application for Staicy. This way, conference attendees got to see their own unique ‘health portrait’ live in 3D.

Turning ‘health portraits’ into leads in minutes

Of course, capturing data at medical conferences was not the end-all, be-all of the campaign. Through retargeting on LinkedIn and ResearchGate as well as an automatic email follow-up, we used the collected data to introduce possible clients to Staicy’s other abilities - this time not directed to the client’s personal health, but pertaining to their own research projects. We were basically leading them through several steps of the sales funnel by e.g. inviting them to a trial version of Staicy.

Flabbergasted by this creative B2B campaign? Share your challenge with us and let's make data-driven art together!