Abstract
This paper describes a new visualization method that helps research participants of “The Hokkaido Study on Environment and Children’s Health: Malformation, Development and Allergy” (“The Hokkaido Study”) understand the relationship between environmental chemicals and children's health and development in a meaningful way. The Hokkaido Study has been investigating the relationship between chemicals and children’s health and development since 2001. Although many results have been obtained, it is difficult for the research participants to understand them using only a conventional visualization method because they are specialized. Therefore, this research developed a new visualization method that uses a support-vector machine and generates a new graph to help the research participants deeply and practically understand The Hokkaido Study’s outcomes by utilizing the traceable data of each participant. Moreover, an experiment was conducted with 17 participants of university students to clarify the usefulness of the proposed graph model. The results verified that the participants felt the proposed graph helped them understand graph information better than the conventional graph did.
