CITY4AGE Caregiver App

Module/Solution Overview

The Caregiver App allows the creation, the fill in, the management and the localization of questionnaires, known also as checklists, aimed to the acquisition of geriatric data that has to be processed and then sent to the Shared Repository through the CBB component. Going into the specifics of the City4Age project, the caregiver meets periodically the elder at her/his home or at the senior center, to submit a geriatric checklist. The questions refer to the period before the visit and are related to the list of monthly direct Measures reported in sub-section 5.1 in document “Dictionary of LEAs and Measures”. Each question includes the selection of a score, from 1 (very poor) to 5 (very good), along with the insertion of an optional comment/motivation justifying the given answer.

Innovation

The main component of the Caregiver App is the Questionnaire plugin, which permits, with a considerable degree of freedom, the creation of checklists. In this way new form can be created or updated. It’s not necessary to have specific technology skills in order to use the caregiver app.

There is also the possibility to interrelate a question to the answer given to another question. It is possible to modify the order in which the questions appear, but that could eventually break the interrelation between question and answer.

Business Impact

Sent data are stored into a local storage in the CBB component and subjected to ETL processes in order to generate direct Measures and send them to the Shared Repository. Monthly, these Measures can be analyzed by caregivers, elders’ family and geriatricians through dashboards or similar applications.

Interoperability

A backend system manages the structure of the checklists along with the related monthly answers. It interacts with a repository for the persistency and a Rest API layer that grants communication between the client and the server. Data correlated to the answer are sent to the CBB component in order to be normalized and transformed in Measures to be forwarded to the Shared Repository.

On the Client side, a Wordpress application is implemented. It integrates and extends the Questionnaire plugin whose main features are:

• It allows the creation and management of multiple checklists of different kinds at the same time
• It has different types of answers:
• The results are stored in the form of comments in the Wordpress database in JSON format, thus allowing easy access to themselves by external programs
• Supports the localization of the text through the use of an additional separate component qTranslate-X

Stakeholders profile

The system is used by three different kinds of actors:

• The admin: s/he manages the system backend, from styling to contents revision, and allows support to a given language that can then be used by editors for checklist creation. S/he can create, modify or delete a checklist and the given answers; other than that s/he can manage creation and cancellation of new users and editors;
• The editor: s/he can create, localize and modify a checklist. S/he can also create a report containing the answers of a given checklist and eventually empty it;
• The caregiver: can answer to the checklists, update and submit geriatric data to the Shared Repository. Data are sent to the CBB component invoking some WoX APIs.

Competitors

There are no many competitors that exploit the web technology in order to get data for geriatric analysis purposes.

Future availability 

The caregiver app has been developed using open source frameworks and platforms. Its code is also open. 

Contact info

city4age@atc.gr