Hands-On

Team Name

Med-X

Timeline

Fall 2019 – Spring 2020

Students

Caleb Jolley
Sansidh Kommaraju
George Mitchell
Paras Sharma
Chris Willingham

Sponsor

RaeAnna Jeffers, Nursing Department

Abstract

One of the most important aspects of commercial software is its intuitiveness, responsiveness, and ease of use of the user interface. In-Home Hospice Care systems provide generous amounts of aid to a patient’s attending physicians. However, charting systems in hospices and in healthcare, in general, have not been user-friendly and by some account lead to an inordinate ratio of time spent by nurses on the system unnecessarily rather than helping patients. But the UI is not the sole problem that we have heard of. Some other problems we have heard of are conflicting physician permissions, portability, the disparity in layouts of applications of the same suit, and unjustifiable amounts of time taken to find forms. Due to the inherent difficulty in operating these systems, the ratio of time spent caring for a patient versus the time spent attempting to manipulate the software is heavily weighted towards the latter. Hence, the opportunity exists in this market for a system to be rid of said problems and is also feasible. As developers with experience in both UI development and application design, we believe we can develop such an easy to use, portable, and consistent system that can be deployed and maintained feasibly.

Background

Many systems, currently in use, employ user interfaces that behave unintuitively. This project’s goal is to create a system with an intuitive user interface such that more time can be spent caring for patients than handling the system. This project will consist of a mobile app that will run primarily on devices running Android operating systems. This will allow for a mobile system that can be run on many hardware systems, such as personal smartphones or company dispensed tablets, and make use of touchscreens built into such devices to aid in ease of use. The user interface is the primary design goal, with HIPAA compliance and a robust back end to support the ability of the system to provide the proper aid to medical professionals.

As a cross-disciplinary project, our sponsor is the UTA CSE department and our customer is the UTA Nursing department. At UTA there is a tradition of healthy inter-disciplinary relationships and one instance would be that between the CSE and Nursing departments. As such our team members and the Nursing department do not have a relationship, but Senior Design teams of the past have worked with the Nursing department on several VR projects due to which there is an open channel of communication and good understanding between both parties. Hence the Nursing department wants us to work on this charting system because they realize the need for an intuitively designed portable charting system and they trust that we can build the system of their desire feasibly with high quality.

Project Requirements

The app shall have a “head-to-toe assessment” form for a walk-in patient.
The medication database shall store all patient data needed by the nurses operating the Hands-On program.
The app shall be available on the Google Play store and all sensitive data storage and transmission shall be done in a HIPAA compliant manner.
The app shall run on a client device with a minimum of 90 Mbps speed internet connection.
All information and access to the system shall be subject to authentication.
Hans-On shall be written in Android Studio.
Hands-On shall work perfectly as intended on an Android tablet.
The app shall work on the client device with a minimum of 1.8 GHz processor.
The app shall at all times respond within 3.5s for loading a page, 0.1 seconds for interacting with an object, and 1 second for echoing of keyboard input.
Hands-On shall store all data on Azure cloud storage.

System Overview

The purpose of the app is to significantly improve the user interface and ease of use because of which the project is estimated to be entirely software-based. Scanning of bar codes of drugs for patients will make use of the camera of the portable device that the system will be running on. That said, the functioning of the system can be divided into the following parts.

Back-end:
All data concerning the app is expected to be sensitive and must be stored in accordance with HIPAA compliance rules. Hence we will be using a HIPAA compliant cloud service, Microsoft Azure, to store and maintain our data. Since the app is aimed at hospices, we don’t expect the volume of data storage required to grow rapidly.
Networking:
The app is responsible for communication to and from the cloud servers, with as little data required to be stored on the client device itself. The client will have to identify and be authenticated by the system using their credentials stored on the cloud server before usage. Security of communication between client and server is not of concern as of now, hence we will operate under the assumption that the channel is secure.
Front-end:
The front-end takes the spotlight in this app. The user interface needs to be fast, intuitive, and minimalistic. Hence client caches will be used to optimize data access and reduce data transfers through the client-server channel. A major step towards increasing the ease of use is the implementation of speech-to-text as a data input method. With a precise and personalized speech-to-text feature, we hope to drastically decrease the time taken to fill out the endless list of forms that every one of us at some point have had the ill fortune of doing.

Results

The end product of this project will be a mobile app that runs primarily on android tablets. The code is maintained privately at a GitLab repository. The comprehensive results of the project are yet to be published here.

Future Work

We have planned to start coding the app and to write unit and integration tests soon in the future.