Founders: Dave Warner, MD, Director & Janice Robertson CFO [Warner Interview, 1995]
I3 is a non-profit organization commited to the curative and prosocial uses of communications technology.
Born in the medical context, an interventional informatic is similar in priniciple to a drug or a surgical intervention. Intervening with information is to introduce an information system (i.e., an informatic) into a human process. The purpose is that the human either enhance some performance or perform something normally impossible because of pathology or injury to the body.
Giving a disabled person an interface device allowing them to operate a computer is an informatic intervention; before the intervention the person could not use a computer. Interventional informatics heals a broken connection between the willful expressional capacities of a mind and a powerful tool for expression.
While in medical school, Dave Warner and partner Janice Robertson conceptualized and founded I3 based on a great deal of research Warner was doing in the areas of neuroscience and rehabilitative engineering. I3's focus was the developement of new methods for human-computer interaction. For the disabled, sensed physio-electrical output from the human body (i.e., facial muscles) served as a basis for further innovations in interface design. Quadreplegics so enabled could participate in information culture. Or for doctors, the internet offers whole new possibilities for medicine at a distance and so they will need new kinds of interfaces for doing internet medicine.
Many and diverse were the volunteers who helped I3 do good things for the world with information technologies (e.g., Markus Schmidt, Stephan, Patrick Keller, Grant Liske, Jeff Sale to name a few). Its deeply Samaritan spirit persists and the details of this are saved for a different space.
Warner left California in the Fall of 1995 to take the good news of Interventional Informatics to Syracuse University where he accepted the Nason Fellowship. At the Northeast Parallel Architectures Center for high performance computing and communications he continues to develop I3's ideas in the areas of HCI. The last picture on this page is of Eyal Sherman, a quadreplegic who joined the team to move the work up to the next level.