Robert Allison, a real pro with SAS/GRAPH and development tester for SAS Institute, has been a long time Dashboard Spy reader with many submissions of dashboard examples. None are cooler than his recent contribution, however.

Check out this Star Trek Medical Dashboard:

Now, isn’t that cool? Check out the live version here:

http://robslink.com/SAS/democd54/startrek_med_dashboard_tips.htm

I LOVE how the pulse rate “beats”.

Here is Robert’s explanation of the dashboard:

>>>>>

This SAS/Graph version shows that SAS can actually “DO” things that were considered “science fiction” in the past. This is a SAS/Graph version of the sick bay Medical Dashboard from the old/original Star Trek TV series.

Here are a few pictures of the original:

The original TV dashboard was actually a pretty good & well thought out design!

I tried to stick with the original design for the most part, but there were a few things that I thought were a natural ‘fit’ for a computerized version
(that they would have probably done originally, if they were able) … such as changing the color of the arrow/pointer to denote which color range the data
value was in, and also printing the numeric value beside of the pointer.

The SAS/Graph version is actually data-driven, and it could hypothetically be set up as a stored process, and made to refresh itself every second or so, and read the latest/greatest data each time it is refreshed.

One ‘trick’ I used (which might be cheating a little) is that since ods html does not support gifanim (yet), and I had to create my own html page, I didn’t get hotspots for my chart tips and drilldowns. So I ran it once with dev=png and saved the html as startrek_med_dashboard_tips.htm, and then hand-edited the html img tag to point to the gif file from my gifanim run.

But this gives my gifanim html mouse-over & drilldown capability, which I thought was a nice touch.

Thanks, Robert.

For those interested, here’s a link to the SAS code for this Star Trek medical bay scanner dashboard example.

Here’s some info on Robert. He’s got a book out! (more on this soon)

Update: His book is available here:

Robert Allison is a development tester for SAS Institute Inc., where he uses SAS products on real-world data and reports problems and feature requests to research and development. A SAS employee and SAS user since the early 1990s, he specializes in SAS/GRAPH and Base SAS (SQL, data steps, merging, transposing, and so on) to prepare the data to be graphed. Robert received his Ph.D. from North Carolina State University and has written and coauthored several papers for SAS Users Group International (SUGI), Regional Conferences, and SAS Global Forum.