Return to
Hartley's Projects Page | Project Metadata | Keywords | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
Purpose: The army wanted to investigate replacing traditional dog-tags with a storage device, the Personal Information Carrier (PIC), that would hold all of the soldier's medical records.
Process: The question revolved around the size of a soldier's medical records. I built a model of the events that would lead to creating a medical record. I found various sources that were useful in estimating the size of the medical record for each event. There were two types of records, text and image. I also found sources for estimating the length of a soldier's service, during which the records would accumulate. Unfortunately, the sponsor could not direct me to any source for the frequency of the types of medical encounters.
However, because the PIC had to handle all situations, all that was required was an estimate of the maximum capacity required. This allowed the use of pseudo-data - estimates - to be used as inputs to the simulations.
Conclusion: The maximum capacity of the time was represented by the CompactFlashTM 15 megabyte storage device. The largest cumulative size produced by the simulation for text data was about 1 megabyte; however, the estimate for image size was over 2 gigabytes. At the time, this was impossible.
Today, flash drives of 32 gigabytes are common. On the other hand, today's medical encounters include CT scans, which can run to 0.4 gigabytes each. The technology to achieve the original goals probably exists, now. However, the security questions for the data remain open.
If you arrived here using a keyword shortcut, you may use your browser's "back" key to return to the keyword distribution page.
Return to
Hartley's Projects Page