Last month, I attended the LandWarNet Conference in Tampa where the theme was “Transforming Cyber While At War.”
In preparation for that I had just written an article entitled “Using Social Media Comments To Speculate About Future Cyber Events” which looked at using data analytic tools that can help predict future events from a collection of blog postings. I wanted to demonstrate that and “Build a Traumatic Brain Injury Knowledge base in the Cloud” for the Binary Group, of which the above graphic is part, using another new state-of-the-art technologies.
My motivation comes from two sources:
Justin (last name withheld), a relative of a Binary Group employee, suffered a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) in Iraq and was diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) upon his return home. We discovered that knowledge about TBI/PTSD is very significant in the outcome of our wounded warriors like Justin and others.
Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, in a memorandum dated 26 June 2008, requested: “the development of a tailored plan to provide R&D investments that advance state of the art solutions for world class medical care with an emphasis on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Traumatic Brain Injury, Prosthetics, Restoration Sight Eye Care, and other conditions directly relevant to the injuries our soldiers are currently receiving on the battlefield.”
This is very timely with the recently updated Defense and Veterans Traumatic Brain Injury Center Web Site and the opening of the new Walter Reed National Military Medical Center (WRNMMC), a tri-service military medical center located on the Bethesda, Maryland, USA campus of the present National Naval Medical Center by September 2011.
The chart above is one of multiple visualizations done in Spotfire, a data analytic software. It’s based on multiple data sets mined from the most authoritative sources we could find and organized in spreadsheets (TBI and Awards).
Additional resources used in building this are found elsewhere. Some of the areas are: Brainline.org, Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury, Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury Research Program, TBI Knowledge-Centric System Knowledge Model, and Common Data Elements for TBI.
The goal is a comprehensive knowledge base that is useful to the three main audiences: Service Members and Veterans, Family Members and Friends, and Providers.
This single chart is part of a much broader knowledge base system of services shown in the capabilities matrix below.
Capabilities Matrix (Note: The order is critical here.)
The numbers in the chart will hopefully be reduced by political action (withdrawal of forces from combat) and their devastating impact on human lives will be lessened by knowledge in the hands of service members and veterans, family members and friends, and providers.