The Medical Mindmap Paper Toolkit provides a set of materials used to model medical mindmaps the analog way (i.e. on paper).
With a Medical Mindmap patients can illustrate their health situation as perceived and experienced, develop their own perspective and expand their understanding about their condition. Furthermore, a Medical Mindmap could also provide new insights and opportunities for improvement.
It works similar to the common mind map concept, allowing all elements to be freely arranged and interconnected and helps to visualize connections and interactions between symptoms and various affecting health factors (e.g. drugs, physical therapy, surgery, diet, activities and emotions).
The Medical Mindmap Paper Toolkit was developed as part of my bachelor thesis to verify the potential of this process. The bachelor thesis will result in a concept for a digital tool to model Medical Mindmaps.
An overview of all shapes, arrows and symbols that are part of the Paper Toolkit.
Each image is linked to the respective file in the repository.
| Name | Print Shape | Red | Yellow | Green | Blue |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Circle |  |
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| Default Usage | Emotional / Social Side-Effect | Mediator, Catalyst | |||
| Cloud |  |
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| Default Usage | Main Symptom | ||||
| Hexagon |  |
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| Default Usage | Negative Medical Influence* | Positive Medical Influence* | |||
| Pillow |  |
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| Default Usage | Disease | ||||
| Rectangle |  |
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| Default Usage | |||||
| Star |  |
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| Default Usage | Symptomatic Side-Effect | Negative Non-Medical Influence** | Positive Non-Medical Influence** |
*Medical = e.g. Surgery, Treatment, Medicine, Therapy
**Non-Medical = e.g. Activity, Emotion, Food, Strategy/Method
| Category | Straight | Curved Left | Curved Right | Two-Sided Straight | Two-Sided Curved |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Normal |  |
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| Default Usage | A triggers / causes B | " | " | A correlates with B | " |
| Bold |  |
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| Default Usage | A triggers / causes B | " | " | A correlates with B | " |
| Dotted |  |
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| Default Usage | A triggers / causes B | " | " | A correlates with B | " |
| Increasing |  |
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| Default Usage | A increases / amplifies B | " | " | ||
| Decreasing |  |
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| Default Usage | A decreases / reduces / lowers B | " | " |
Various PDF collections of the Medical Mindmap Paper Toolkit for printing at home. You may download the complete Paper Toolkit or just parts of (right-click -> save target/link as).
All Arrows
Big Arrows
Small Arrows
All Shapes
Big Shapes
Medium Shapes
Small Shapes
Assuming you have printed the Medical Mindmap Paper Toolkit or parts of it, you may cut all elements before modeling or just cut desired elements as needed.
The steps below outline the typical Medical Mindmapping process (but you may differ from it):
Start by writing symptoms, therapies and other health factors (e.g. drugs, physical therapy, surgery, diet, activities and emotions), which are important to you, on shapes.
Arrange the shape elements on a plain sheet of paper or cardboard and connect them using arrows, which visually describe the relationship appropriately.
- You may change everything at any time (e.g. arrangement, shapes, colors and sizes).
- You can freely choose the visual representation of your elements regarding their properties (e.g. color, shape, size).
- Decide on a logical structure to give the different properties a meaning and keep it.
- At first, concentrate on aspects that are clear and easy for you (e.g. a shape and color for your main symptoms) and go into detail from there.
- You may cut your own shapes or differ the stencils as desired.
- Think about how the elements relate to each other and select arrows representing these relationships in a suitable way.
Now that you got a first structure, you may play with the arrangement and add further information to it.
When you are happy with your arrangement, you should fix the elements with some adhesive paste (you may glue it, but adhesive paste allows easy moving and removing of elements later on).
- There is a number of symbols included in this Paper Toolkit to add further details to your Mindmap, but you may also create your own or new symbols.
- All information for which you can not find a visual representation, but is important to you, you can write it on paper snippets and fix them next to the corresponding elements.
Now it's time to create a legend to explain (and store) the meaning of your chosen arrows, shapes, colors and symbols.
You should use the provided legend template (available in English and German), which makes Medical Mindmaps more consistent and comparable.
Here you can see the Medical Mindmap of a Morbus Bechterew Patient and the corresponding Legend to get you inspired.
Note that your own Medical Mindmap will most likely look different.
You can find more Medical Mindmaps in the mindmap repository.
If you use the Medical Mindmap Paper Toolkit to model your own Medical Mindmap, we would like you to share the results with us.
If you want to contribute you can just clone the repository, make your changes and provide your contribution as pull-request. Before your pull-request can be merged it needs to approved.
Medical Mindmap Paper Toolkit by Open Medicine Initiative e.V. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
