The BiSC project seen from the perspective of data!
The BiSC project is a large study. The recruitment of volunteers has not stopped at any time since its inception. In fact, it has even faced a pandemic like the one we are experiencing right now. Since 2018, the entry of volunteers, their partners and later their babies has been continued.
At the moment, the number of volunteer families has already exceeded one thousand and, once again, we are very grateful to them.
But when it comes to the truth, what is all this involvement about? What do we get out of so many visits, questionnaires and tests? The answer to these two questions is the same: data.
The data, after all, condenses all the information that our volunteers send us. And it is through the analysis of these that we can find answers to the initial questions of the project. That is, without the data we get from household participation there would be no BiSC.
If the project has more than a thousand participants and data is extracted from all of them, the volume of these must be huge, right? Indeed!
We will go into a little more detail …
If we put in the same bag the data of:
- prenatal visits to hospitals
- home visits
- questionnaires self-completed by the volunteers
- biological samples
- clinical and hospital trials
- birth
- postnatal visits
- internal control and monitoring files
The final sum of the volume of this data rises to enormous values. In terms of units of stored data size, we are talking about an approximate value that exceeds 900 GB.
Imagine this 900 GB in more familiar drives, equivalent to about 260 one-and-a-half-hour movies or more than 260,000 4-minute songs. In other words, the amount of information we have today is very huge and complex.
Finally, a little reflection, if without data there is no BiSC and if without our participants there is no data; without our participants, the BiSC project would not exist. Again, thank you!
The text has been written by Àlex Morillas Tébar, data manager of the BiSC project.