Smart solution to support digital entry of neuropsychological patient data

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis was to design, implement and evaluate a smart device application for the convenience of neuropsychologists in the field of neuropsychology tests. These tests are primarily conducted to assess the cognitive condition of a patient and decide further medications, if he or she is suffering from Alzheimer disease which is most commonly found type of dementia in elderly people. While conducting these tests, traditionally pen and paper are used to record the patient’s score. Results are then forwarded to the people responsible for data entry job in the clinics to manually enter each patient’s data to their HIS (Hospital Information System). Another issue with traditional approach is that the clinicians prepare these tests on a computer and then print them before going to patient’s test session. These tests could not be modified without going back to the system, update it and print it again. To address these issues, a smart device application was developed, targeting iOS platform initially, in which the clinicians can design the test form according to their and patient’s needs and modify it anytime anywhere without requiring any exceptional prior knowledge of smart devices. The clinicians can use these pre-designed test form to record the patients’ test results within the application that can be directly saved to the server without involving any other person for manual data entry. This application also enables the clinicians to update patient’s test results if something goes wrong during the session or after it and update them on the server in a convenient way. Requiring the patient’s personal information to keep its test results stored, the application is also providing the feature of managing their personal details. These personal details are transferred using the SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption technology between smart device application and server application for the purpose of security and privacy. A user study, containing four participants, was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness and performance of the application. In this study, the participants were required to perform a set of tasks in which all features of the application got evaluated. The effectiveness and performance of the application was evaluated against the amount of time consumed by the participants to complete the tasks list compared to number of errors made by them. After performing these tasks, a semi-structured interview session was conducted to obtain the participants’ feedback evaluating the usability of application. According to the results of this study, this solution was found to be a useful application offering a valuable set of features to design, modify and use any kind of entry forms as per the needs of its users. Appreciating the proposed solution, they also suggested some new features and modification to existing ones that may increase user’s interest in it.