Another sigh of relief as this one bites the dust.

I have to admit I found this assignment fairly challenging, well question 3 anyway. It was a question geared at your ability to write a report in non-technical language, albeit in the most ambiguously constructed question I have ever faced at the OU. To be honest I am just glad to have completed it and know that I only have an ECA left for this course and a further ECA for T175 and then this year is done. I can look forward to 5 weeks travelling Europe with my girlfriend to recharge the batteries.

On a slightly different note I went to the last tutorial for T175 last wednesday. Only 3 students turned up, if i'm honest this is only the second tutorial I have attended for T175 but I'm glad I did, it was very reassuring and cleared up any questions I had as we talked through what was expected of us.

Whilst attending the tutorial a member of the guidance/support staff was there to discuss how we as students were finding the OU and what we were planning going forward. When I told her that I was registered for 90 points next year she laughed, as did my tutor, who then jested that my social life was gone. I hope their laugh's were unjustified but I guess this will be the place to look in twelve months time to find out!!

Once I have the results for this assignment I will post up my scores for the year for both T175 and M150, and when the End of Course Assessments are returned I will update those scores as well.

Finally!

Its taken its time this one, partly because I haven't been able to hit it in one go but also because I don't really think the questions are worded as clearly as they could be. I often spent 30 mins deliberating a question before answering it, thinking what do they really want?

TIP: Look at the learning outcomes at the start of an assignment and use them to target your answers, they are more helpful than I would have thought and to be honest I have never considered using them.

The TMA covered a lot of area's,

Question 1 focused very much on telemedicine in the UK and India and the limitations of such systems and implications of there existence. For those of you who don't know telemedicine is basically delivering medicine via technology. This often involves networks of sorts, in remote locations these will be satellite based. The result is that you can have a doctor in one part of the world viewing and diagnosing patient scans from a remote location such as a war zone or village. This can also be stretched further to telesurgery where a surgeon controls robots from a distance operating on a patient potentially from another continent. There seems to be a lot to consider here, from bandwidth and latency right through to responsiveness of the equipment. There would be absolutely no point in having the worlds best surgeon in America operating on a patient in say India if the equipment was very unresponsive and didn't behave as expected.

Question 2 surrounded the use of the U.S.A's Vehicle Infrastructure Integration (VII) and Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC). The technology is based around the idea that cars can be equipped with GPS, and coupled with there hundreds of existing on board sensors from ABS to rain sensors, be able to communicate to roadside hubs and other vehicles their driving habits, speeds, direction of travel, acceleration, terrain and weather conditions. This should then be able to alert drivers in the vicinity of accidents and congestion and also whether intersections are safe to cross.

Question 3 targeted Databases and the U.K's pioneering National ID card programme and the Biometric data involved. You were questioning the issues surrounding a central database which stored such biometric information and the risks and implications that this could have. This question was very relevant and interesting and I enjoyed tackling it very much.

Finally, Question 4! This question covered health on-line and used this to discuss issues such as content, accessibility and usability of such services. You were asked to compare to online services such as NHS Direct and BBC health and evaluate how well the covered these basics. It was very interesting to see how different websites tackle different accessibility issues, especially the likes of health sites which are likely to have a very wide and diverse customer base.

Anyway all is done and I am looking forward to getting my End of Course Assessment done and completing this course!