Person-centred care for dementia patients (backend system)

• Main Author: Sim, Davidson Wei Keong
• Other Authors: Chan Syin
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2018
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/74060
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Dementia is a mental health condition that primarily affects older people. The condition causes the brain cells to die faster than normal thus affecting a person of intellectual abilities. This results in conditions such as loss of memory, reasoning and communication. The losses of intellectual abilities will gradually increase and may interfere in the person’s daily activities that could also bring personality changes and other diseases. Hence, to support dementia patients and their caregivers, a group of university student researchers have created an online centralized platform system to manage the needs of dementia patients. There are four key objectives in this project. The first objective in this project is to enhance on the existing inherited backend system (version 3) with essential testing and modification. The second objective in the project is to improve the connectivity of the Front-End PEAR Application as there is high latency during connection to the database from the live server. The third objective of the project is to provide security measures in the existing backend system to ensure that the confidential data are well protected. The fourth objective of the project is to migrate the existing live server from United States of America (USA) to a server located in Singapore (SG). The backend structure involved two key segments, a web-based platform built using C#, HTML5 and JavaScript language, and a MSSQL Database Server. The web-based platform offers the users multiple functions like managing data such as patients’ information, patient’s game information and patient’s schedule generator to generate multiple suitable schedules for each patient based on the approved game recommendation and the patient’s preferences.Access to the database server is shared between three teams of the PEAR system – Backend System (BS) team, Person-Centred Care (PCC) team, and Android Game Development (AGD) team. The PCC team develops and maintains the Front-End Pear Application that is on android platform. The BS team develops and maintains both web application and database. The AGD team develops game for dementia patients. Initially, the PEAR application encountered issues such as delays connecting to the database server directly. One solution was to create Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to address the problems, however, it was not straightforward as the existing system was not compatible. Security measures need to be implemented to protect the sensitive information of patient details. Lastly, the existing database server was expiring, and a new substitute server was required urgently.