Person-centred care for dementia patients (front end system development)

• Main Author: Ang, Royce Jia Jie
• Other Authors: Chan Syin
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2022
• Subjects: Engineering::Computer science and engineering
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/163096
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Dementia is a progressive neurodegenerative brain disease defined as irreversible functional and cognitive impairment. The prevalence of dementia is expected to rise and is not just a medical problem but an enormous socioeconomic burden for the individual, family, and the country. Thus, the Person-centred care approach is adopted in care centres to ensure good dementia care. Person-centred care is contingent upon knowing the individual via an interpersonal relationship and focuses on building around the needs of the individual. However, with an uncompromising chronic demand for attachment from patients with dementia (PWD), caregivers are susceptible to caregiving strain. In this project, the Person-Centred Care (PEAR) system is a centralised care centre management system that helps caregivers by providing visibility into the needs of the PWD while adopting a person-centred care approach, managing expectations and having effective communications between the different stakeholders: the supervisor, game therapist, guardian, administrator, and doctor. This project has been passed on to several groups, resulting in the challenging task of maintaining the amassed codebase. Additionally, student developers have been yearning for a better technology stack. As such, the project's objective as a front-end mobile application developer is to introduce a maintainable framework, restructure the overall workflow for current and future batches to bridge the knowledge gap. And to further develop the existing person-centred patient- management application, with greater emphasis on users’ needs, which will serve as a baseline for future development. The project's essential tasks include migrating from a native Android application to a modern component-based React Native Expo framework with a new User Interface experience and introducing a new project management framework. Additionally, the overall architecture of the existing system is reassessed for availability, for instance, ensuring the availability of the application during network outages. The results from this project will provide the existing team and future members with a modern component-based React Native Expo framework, a project management framework to realign with users' needs, a maintainable code base, a methodology to iterate faster and, ultimately, to facilitate the project to completion.