Project gallery

SmartCare

Lead Principal Investigator:
Dr. Gewei Zhang, College of Engineering
Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering

Project Objective:

To develop an App on Android smart phones that creates an easy-to-use channel for patients to send on-site symptom pictures to the nurses or doctors, which will greatly increase the efficiency of the conversation.

Problem statement

While smart phones are very popular with the patients already, the on-call nursing of the local healthcare groups still rely on the basic voice conversation over the telephone call. A set of common problems exist in such a conversation: a) A patient must spend a lot of time to choose the right voice menu or speak identity clues, such as name, date of birth, home address, symptom, etc., to a record system. b) The on-call nurse often cannot recognize the symptom well, so he/she has to ask the patient again. c) To describe a symptom by talking is always low efficient, error-prone, and maybe quite difficult for people without professional medical training.

Approach

By taking advantage of the smart phone technologies, we can develop an App named “SmartCare”, to take pictures and direct them to the computers at a medical office, so the nurses or doctors can see the symptom in an intuitive way and respond to the patient more efficiently.

A 2-dimensional barcode can be published in the medical office so the patients can use their smart phones to scan and download this App. Once installed, they need to register and link their phones to the corresponding account, and then they will be able to send symptom pictures to the office when they have a nursing question.

The pictures will be cached in a server until the specific office client receives them. This client can be running on a PC or a tablet.