RRNLs Project Showcase
Reference Range Number Lines
About This Project
For patients with chronic diseases, reference range number lines (RRNLs) can be useful tools in monitoring their health. Existing studies on RRNLs explore how design influences the patient’s understanding of health status, risk, and resulting behaviors. Despite their usefulness in healthcare contexts, there are few visualization tools for creating RRNLs. This project introduces a domain-specific language (DSL) that streamlines the creation of reference range number lines while supporting both reproducibility and customization.
The Problem
RRNLs can help patients interpret lab values, but they are often difficult to create consistently and reproduce across studies or tools.
The Solution
Our DSL provides a set of customizable properties for generating consistent RRNLs at scale.
The Outcome
Developers, doctors, and patients can more easily interpret and reproduce data.
Personal health data can inform patients and guide health-related decisions, but low literacy levels can limit its effectiveness. Additionally, the stress associated with accessing healthcare information, particularly in emergency or intensive care situations, can increase cognitive load and negatively affect information retention. These factors make it challenging to understand, retain, and apply health information in decision-making, but data visualizations help address this by conveying complex information more clearly and reducing cognitive burden.
Reference range number lines (RRNLs) are visualizations that have shown strong potential for improving comprehension of health information. These visualizations display a single-value datum along a continuous scale that is categorically classified based on reference ranges. However, RRNLs are not well-defined, and there is no formalized method for designing them. In this project, we propose a domain-specific language (DSL) that breaks RRNLs into their core components and provides a standardized method for generating them. Our website showcases this DSL and includes an editor for creating RRNLs in a consistent and reproducible manner.
Graph Editor
Experiment with the RRNL specification and see how structured inputs become generated visualizations.
Meet the Team
Learn more about the students behind the project and the people who contributed to the work.
View the Report
Read the full writeup for project context, design motivation, implementation, and future directions.
Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) is a top-tier, STEM-focused university with an R1 research classification and global leadership in project-based learning. Founded in 1865, WPI’s distinctive approach integrates classroom theory with real-world practice, preparing students to tackle critical challenges through inclusive education, impactful projects, and interdisciplinary research. With more than 70 bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degree programs across 18 academic departments and over 50 global project centers, WPI advances knowledge and innovation in fields such as life sciences, smart technologies, advanced materials and manufacturing, and global innovation. Learn more at https://www.wpi.edu/.