Master's degree in Computer Science




Abstract/Summary:

The smartcard is an innovative computerized media which marks a new step in the computerization and decentrilization of sensitive data. Many applications, in Europe as well as in Japan, already use this new technology and the success of the memory card becomes more and more visible.

Integrating the smartcard in a health care management system sets us many problems regarding structuring the data as well as regarding the physical space required to store the medical records.

Experiments held in Europe, using smartcards, highlight the card saturation problem and the importance of a secure logical access to the data via good interfaces. In this research, we propose a card management scenario and present a solution to the saturation problem by designing and realizing a portable medical record. We realized a survey of all known smartcard techmologies and tested them. All smartcard masks on the market are bank application oriented. We had to adapt the chip operating system as well as our application in order to use the selected cards for our medical application. For that precice purpose, we designed a smart driver as a shell between the medical application and the card and a front end structure for the medical records. The Shell is known as SCAM for memory card server. SCAM is able to recognize the card technology it is dealing with and addresses it with its suited set of commands. SCAM is also able to communicate with different application that need to use the medical records in the card. The shell uses a context related data compression algorithm to compress the medical records with a ratio up to 0.95. Finaly, SCAM manages different access profiles and has its own secure access control to allow using passive memory cards like lazer cards or high density magnetic cards.

Québec, April 1992.


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