Gray code at the pediatrician's office

[anigbrowl]

Hmm. As a geek I like Gray code and think it has many useful applications, but this is not one of them: Iris stood against the post and the nurse adjusted the bracket to exactly the top of her head. Then she read off Iris's height from an attached display.

How is this an advance on looking at a conventionally numbered ruler (with a similar bracket to touch the top of the head) and writing down the number? It's technological and presumably expensive, but it isn't delivering any discernible benefit that I can see. Measuring height via computer vision + Gray code would be very useful in security applications where you want to log biometric information for a large number of people efficiently (camera + abstract-looking wall design in an access corridor or at a security checkpoint), but if you're paying a human to take the measurement you might as well use a scale that's easily human-readable (ie at a glance). I hope the doctor's scale was at least using bluetooth or similar to automatically update the patient's digital record...but I wouldn't bet on it.

[TetOn]

Presumably it's considered useful because there's a measurable error rate in the nurse a) reading -and/or- b) recording the observed data. Assuming this thing works properly more often, you've not only guaranteed you get the data entered properly, but it's more likely to be right.

[mjd]

The same question came up on Reddit (in the agressive know-it-all tone typical of Reddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8ufl1/gray_code...) when I first posted this blog article. So I asked the pediatrician, and the answer (http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8ufl1/gray_code...) was surprising:

>I was back at the office today and I asked one of the senior doctors about it. She said that the manual stadiometers were always giving inaccurate readings and that they constantly had to have the service guys in to recalibrate them. The electronic stadiometer, she said, is much more reliable.

>"But it's a really expensive stadiometer," I said.

>"The service calls on the manual stadiometers were costing us a fortune."

>The radio connection to the portable readout is a red herring. They had the display mounted on the wall right next to the stadiometer. I asked if they ever took it down and moved it around; the doctor said they never did.

>So there's your answer. It's nothing clever, but it's totally reasonable, and it's nothing you could deduce from your armchair. This is why it's important to suspend judgment of someone's actions when you don't have any direct knowledge of their situation.

Hope this helps.

[SoftwareMaven]

The article didn't say, but I would imagine the actual records would receive the vitals directly from the machine, rather than going through a nurse (it also may be a work in progress as an office moves to electronic records and streamlining vitals). The nurse reads the number off the indicator for the benefit of the patient, not the records.

I agree, as the article reads, it would just be silly to add the additional cost with no change other than needing a machine to read the numbers.

[ColinWright]

Previous discussions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=667689

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=899913

[Corrado]

OK, it may be an old question but why doesn't HN search for old URLs before allowing you to post? I missed this the first time around and am really glad that it got posted (and glad you found the dupes) but most reposts are bad. I think something like a URL check would be valuable.

[mjd]

Also this: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8ufl1/gray_code...

[llimllib]

Here's another visualization of the Gray code: http://billmill.org/static/perm4.png

(it's from a few visualizations of permutations I did a while ago: http://billmill.org/permvis.html )

[clvv]

A partially related topic(maybe many of you already know): I was learning about minimizing logic expressions the other day, and I learned about the Karnaugh Map, which uses Gray code for its axes. You can read more about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karnaugh_map

[Bdennyw]

When I looked at that pattern I though "Looks like one of Wolframs FSAs". And after reading the encoding algorithm, seems like it is. See http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/ElementaryCellularAutomato...

[T-hawk]

Gray code was used as long ago as the Atari 2600 game system, designed in 1977. The system's clock for drawing out sprite graphics pixels counts in Gray code internally. Why? Because a binary adder could have too long a propagation delay. To increment 01111111 to 10000000 requires seven carry operations which would not always complete within a single clock cycle. (A modern ALU has tons of transistors to compute all those bits in parallel, but the Atari 2600 mass market game console did not have the budget for that many transistors.) Gray code was the solution. It always changes only one bit to increment a counter so the operation was guaranteed to complete quickly.

[DerekL]

No, they didn't use Grey code for that, they used a "linear feedback shift register". A LFSR has lower propagation delay than a normal binary counter.

The driving controllers did use Grey code.

[orenmazor]

extremely fascinating, but what problem does this solve that a standard analog equivalent ruler/markings didn't?

[izak30]

The optical machine doesn't have to count lines, it can read it's place on the bar from a small (2cm wide) part, rather than keeping an incrementer from the bottom or top.

[fudged71]

This is incredibly interesting. Thank you!