I got to see a very cool use for Flex and AIR in Higher Education today. It's the DMD Project from the Masters in Human-Computer Interaction Program at Carnegie Mellon University.

It's a prototype RIA for patient management at dental offices. It was designed for touch screens, but also can be used with the traditional keyboard and mouse interface as well. It shows everything dentists, hygienists, and front office staff would need to manage the entire patient interaction.

I got a chance to talk with one of the developers, Jaanus Kase, about it. He told me that they spent most of their time upfront researching how exactly dentist's offices would need to interact with a system. That yielded a few custom interfaces, including the "radiograph view" which the rest of us just know as "an x-ray of all of your teeth." The other cool thing I noticed was the high emphasis they place on important information like "Severe Penicillin Allergy." Clearly, this program really does focus on quality computer-human interactions.

The project itself is a prototype; don't expect to see it in your dentist's office anytime soon. But the app is available as an AIR application for your review.

Jaanus is done with the Masters program now, and is working with an startup in New York named World Evolved.