Development of a Person-centred care system for dementia patients (Android PEAR app)

• Main Author: Goh, Pei Shan
• Other Authors: Lau Chiew Tong
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/72931
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The synergy of the Person-centred Care (PCC) approach and technology can potentially push the boundaries of traditional caregiving, alleviate the stress on caregivers, re-examine the inclinations of dementia patients, and complement efforts to deliver quality healthcare services pertinent to a population-aging Singapore. Therefore, this project aims to extend the use of the PCC approach in the implementation of mobile technology to develop an Android application for use within a dementia care centre to manage the records of dementia patient’s information and condition history, and generate personalized day to day schedule for each patient in a fast, user friendly and robust manner. As the project is a continuation of an existing final year project (FYP), the focus of this report is not on the functionalities of the application, but on optimization and certain architectural issues that are a bottleneck to the speed and performance of the application. The methods used are the implementation of a Singleton Class, Multithreading and the creation of a Python API with Connection Pooling in order to improve the speed and performance of the application. Both the Singleton Class and Python API with Connection Pooling method is effective in improving the speed of the application while Multithreading unblocks the UI thread for a better user experience but does not improve the speed of the application. In conclusion, the PEAR app is designed with the intention of enhancing the dementia care centre's data collection and analysis of patients’ data in order to develop individualized care plans to subsequently heighten the quality of care for the patients and the well-being of the caregivers.