AcuMapper

We are pleased to release a new feature on Rootdown.us, which we have been calling ‘AcuMapper’ - in Beta (or still being tested and developed).

It’s actually more of a tool than a service on the site, and it’s the most interactive piece we’ve made so far. The premise is to create something similar to the acupuncture models that we usually find, the rubber figure that is saturated with points and information.

While this may have been a useful tool in the past, I couldn’t help to think that there has to be a better way to look at this information, a way to filter out only what you need to see in a tool online. While it’s true that this may be a tool geared more for students of acupuncture and Oriental medicine (or TCM, Traditional Chinese Medicine), I think that teachers and professionals will also find this helpful when showing it to their classes or patients.

AcuMapper allows you to turn on or off layers of skin, musculature, skeleton and combinations there of. You can also turn on or off lines of acupuncture meridians (the lines really aren’t that accurate yet), and the acupuncture points themselves. The images also show the front and back of the body. All of these can bee zoomed in and out and panned around by dragging the images.

This is all made possible by using the image tilling from Google Maps. We created our own 3D images of the male body and flattened them into front and back files. Since they are high resolution files, the best way to deliver quality images was to use a service such as Google’s. Luckily, we were able to create a hack that allows us to ‘throw out’ the geographical data and substitute them with our own images. The points work as they would on a map too, only instead of towns or directions, they pull in data from our database. All the acupuncture points have point descriptions from CAM and Deadman’s books and have their titles or names are in both English and Chinese.

The feedback that we’ve received from members has been great and many people have been coming to the site just to use the tool. As result, we want people to use the tool so much, that we are literally giving it away. So now, if you want this tool on your own website or blog, just copy the embed code below the map and paste it into your site! The map will work the same as it does on Rootdown.us.

We are really excited about this new feature and we look forward to hearing about how we can improve upon it still. Already we are making individual maps for each acupuncture meridian that has the proper posturing, and are working on getting the maps to work in several different languages as well. We know there have been a few bugs in it as well, regarding the Google maps API key and we think we have that fixed now. Please let us know of any bugs or requests that you may have. Thank you and enjoy AcuMapper!