Chapter 17, Problem 6RQ

You are developing a program to record information about patients at a doctor’s office. Write the code to accomplish the following goals.

Section 1: Patient Information

Create a single-column cell array named Patients containing the names shown in the menu.

Determine the number of names in Patients and place the result in NumPat. Your code must determine how many names there are in Patients; DO NOT hard-code this value. Your code should still work correctly if the number of names stored in Patients changes.

Ask the nurse to choose the patient name being seen during an office visit from a menu of patient names, located in the cell array Patients. A menu with the current five names is shown here as an example.

Ask the nurse to enter the selected patient’s weight in pounds. This numeric value should be placed in a column vector wt in the location corresponding to the location of that patient in the Patients cell array. For example, if the selected patient is Thomas Clemson, when the nurse types in his weight, the value will be placed in the fourth element of wt. Note that the nurse does not enter the location in the vector, the program takes care of that.

Create a text string named Gender consisting of a series of the letter X. The length of this text string should equal the number of names in Patients. For example, with the values stored in Patients given above, Gender would contain xxxxx.

Ask the nurse to enter the patient’s gender as a single letter chosen from M, F, T. (Some folks might argue vociferously concerning what categories should be included here, but this is just a homework assignment, not a philosophical discussion of gender identity and its classification, so chill out.) The letter typed by the nurse should REPLACE the corresponding X in the text string Gender. Thus if the nurse had selected Thomas Clemson and typed an M for gender, the text string Gender would then contain XXXMX , assuming no other patients’ information had been previously entered. Again, the nurse does not specify the location in the text string, the code does that.

Ask the nurse to enter the selected patient’s temperature [°F]. Place this numeric value in the corresponding element of a column vector named Temp. Thus if Thomas Clemson was selected and had a temperature of 98.7"F, the fourth element of Temp would then contain 98.7.

Section 2: Basic Report

Print a report on the screen similar to the following for the selected patient. Note that there is a blank line between the first line and the second line, and a blank line between the last line and the MATLAB prompt (>>). Also the last digit of the weight should be aligned beneath the "h" in "Weight", the gender identifier should be aligned under the letter d of "Gender", and the last digit of the temperature should be aligned under the "a" of "Temperature"

Patient: Thomas Clemson

Weight Gender Temperature

195 M 98.7

>>