Pear : android tablet application for person-centred care of dementia patients

• Main Author: Sutrisno Suryajaya Dwi Putra
• Other Authors: Chan Syin
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2015
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Computer applications::Life and medical sciences
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/65602
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

With the rapid growth of elderly population, dementia sufferers are projected to increase significantly in the next 30 years. The absence of cure or treatment for dementia has encouraged researchers around the world to identify the remedy and asserted the importance of dementia care in improving a patient’s life. Recent studies have shown that person-centred care can improve a dementia patient’s quality of life and family experience. However, it has been acknowledged that implementing person-centred care in practice is a big challenge for healthcare providers. This was due to the lack of resources in implementing person-centred care. This project aims to develop a person-centred care system for day care centres, namely Pear. The system makes use of an Android application to help the caregivers to gather a patient’s information such that a personalized (person-centred) schedule can be generated. The schedule is intended to assist caregivers in performing person-centred care to dementia patients. Aside from that, the application is also equipped with complementary features, such as log patient's problems, capture patient’s information with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and in-app notification to further enhance the person-centred care. Pear was developed with maintainability, flexibility and user experience as the main focus. The author believes that the project will easily be continued by the new FYP students to build a system that improves the care received by dementia patients without increasing the caregivers’ burden to perform person-centred care.