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Currently 6.8 million children in America have asthma, a disease of the respiratory system that causes inflammation of the airways. An asthma action plan is an individualized health management plan that doctors give to their patients to help control their condition. It functions by illustrating what actions to take at different levels of symptom severity from day-to-day medication use to emergency situations. A problem arises for the caregivers of asthmatic children who may not have the educational background to understand the information in an action plan.

Data visualization systems have predominantly been developed for WIMP-based direct manipulation interfaces. Only recently have other forms of interaction begun to appear, such as natural language or touch-based interaction, though usually operating only independently. Prior evaluations of natural language interfaces for visualization have indicated potential value in combining direct manipulation and natural language as complementary interaction techniques. Unfortunately, however, little work has been done in exploring such multimodal visualization interfaces.

Reimagining a lost nineteenth-century haptic visualization scheme