supervised_user_circle

Every year around the world millions of people in difficulty are assisted and visited by non-profit organizations

assignment

They receive initial treatment but rarely get a file to be submitted to subsequent visits

credit_card

The Asylum project aims to provide them with a small size card, complete, durable and economical, containing health information

Asylum is a framework made up of a software for health cards printing and a database containing the data collected. The data is put on a credit card size sheet as QR code.

print

Print format

The size of the ID-card is defined by the ISO / IEC 7810 standard, type ID-1, equal to 85.6 × 54 mm (3⅜ × 2⅛ in). This format is commonly used for banking PVC cards.

The material used is a substrate composed of polyester and silica, ecological, porous, flexible and extremely resistant devised by PPG Industries™. The main characteristics of this material are:

• flexibility
• no toxicity: when burned it produces only water, CO₂ and silica
• resistance to chemical agents, temperature and humidity
• presence of a layer of protection against UV rays

The use of such material guarantees high quality, less costs and lower toxicity compared to PVC. To increase the resistance to bending is possible to laminate the cards, but this procedure may cause a decrease in readability.

Among the commercially available materials we tested grade IJ1000WP (ink-jet printing pigment, 254 microns) and SPID700 (laser printing, 178 microns) film. Experimentally laser printing has proved sharper edges and higher contrast with better overall readability.

Among tested supports, Xerox™ DocuCard™ (1-Up version for Laser Printers, produced in ISO A4 print size) resulted extremely practical, with a high print quality and ease of reading. The card is included in the sheet and, once printed, can be detached.

gradient

Bidimensional code

The two-dimensional code used is the Quick Response Code. Developed by Denso Wave and promoted by Google, QRcode can contain, for a given area, four times more information than the PDF417 and is readable quickly from any smartphone with the appropriate software. The QRcode has free license to use and the encoding of the data is defined by the ISO / IEC standard 18004:2006.

A QRcode can theoretically contain thousands of characters (up to 4,296), though its practical use is limited by:

Version: from 21x21 points (version 1) to 177x177 points (versione 40) called modules; an increase of a version corresponds to an increase of 4 modules per side.

Data type: Numeric (3⅓ bits per symbol), alphanumeric (5½ bits per symbol), binary (8 bits per symbol). Although using the alphanumeric set is virtually possible to double the capacity of the code, the character set includes only enough characters to write a base URI (0-9 A-Z $% * + -. /: Space). Not providing for the carriage return and quotes, the resulting writing would be too hard to read later.

Error correction (EC): defines the ability to reconstruct a partially damaged code. It can take four values: L, M, Q, H, with the ability to read a code with about 7%, 15%, 25%, 33% of missing parts. The EC makes up more losses neighboring code at the center; the loss of the three largest squares in the corners (locators), or of the areas between them (timing indicators) makes the code unreadable.

Resolution: using 5 mm bleed on each side code must have dimensions 44 × 44 mm. Denso recommends printing using a density of at least 4 print lines per module: at a print resolution of 300 lines/inch a version code 28 (129 modules per side) would have a 4 lines module (0.3 mm). Experimentally it is possible to verify that a value so small is read hardly by cameras of smartphones. To maintain a safety margin the version should be set between 17 (6 lines per module) and 21 (5 lines per module).

The version 17 of the code is able to contain up to 644 characters, while the version 21 is able to contain 929. The EC used (codice Reed-Solomon) increases the ability to recognize damaged code increasing the amount of stored data, thus causing an increase in the density of information with increased reading difficulties.

On the basis of these considerations it is possible to hypothesize a capacity of theoretical storage between 280 (Version 17, EC-H) and 929 (Version 21, EC-L) characters as binary data.

settings_applications

Software

Asylum is a web application written exclusively in Javascript that does not require internet connection to run. The connection is only required to upload the data to the server.

QR code and PDF document generation rely on Javascript external libraries.

QRcode library: jQuery.qrcode
PDF library: PDFKit

supervisor_account

Asylum team

Francesco Barbero Nurse

Marioluca Bariona Nurse, developer of the software

Federica Chiale Doctor, pediatrician

Paolo Narcisi Doctor, anesthetist, creator of the project

Luca Pigozzi Doctor

Stefano Spinelli Doctor

Xiaowei Yan Doctor

Partner:

Rainbow for Africa onlus

(CC) BY-SA 4.0 ASYLUM Team