HomeCare

HomeCare is an Android application for nurses working in a home care environment. The app supports narrative note taking for nurses. Its goal is to improve note taking for nurses by reducing the time and error rate. The application allows the user to define and manage so called stock answers, sentences that repeatedly appear in the narrative notes of a patient. Using these stock answers the nurse can save patient information more quickly and accurately. This gives the nurse more time to care for the patient. Depending on the nurse’s environment, our application provides a broad range of flexibility concerning the input methods. Besides the stock answers, the nurse can use voice input and typing to complete the patient’s information. If the nurse wants to recall information, there are four possibilities depending on what type of information is needed. The nurse can search for information in our application using a specific time block or a body system. As well as search for information by nurse name and recall last 4 hours information. In the following, we will show the different tasks our application supports and provide explanations on how to correctly execute them.

Download the app from the GitHub uwcse481h2016/HomeCare repository (https://github.com/uwcse481h2016/HomeCare/blob/master/HomeCare.apk?raw=true). Download the apk directly to an Android device or transfer it from your computer.

After successfully downloading the apk, open the file named HomeCare.apk. Open the HomeCare.apk, an installation page will show up. In order to install HomeCare, click on “INSTALL”. The device will tell you when the installation succeed. Click on “DONE” or “OPEN”. If the “OPEN” button is clicked, the main menu for the HomeCare application will show up.

The user always has to sign in with their name in order to use the application. If the user does not sign in, they will not be able to use the functionalities of our application.

To add the new stock answer to the system, the user has to select the button SET UP STOCK ANSWERS on the main menu. On the following screen, the user can select a body system on the left by tapping the small arrow. They can enter the text for the stock answer on the right. If the user does not enter a text, a reminder will pop up asking the user to enter a stock answer. If the stock answer is added successfully it will appear in the list on the screen and the user will be notified by a pop-up message.

The user can delete a stock answer by selecting the SET UP STOCK ANSWERS on the main menu. The screen presents the currently saved stock answers to the user. Each stock answer has a delete button. Once the delete button is pressed by the user, the stock answer is deleted from the database.

To save patient information, the user selects the SAVE INFORMATION button on the main menu. Then the user can choose a body system for which the information should be saved. After selecting the body system, the app will display the predefined stock answers for the chosen system. The user can then choose one or multiple stock answers from the list. If they want to input more detailed information, they can choose voice input by clicking the microphone button or typing text into the text field. If the user chooses speech recognition, the captured input will be displayed to the user and they have chance to edit it. After the user is satisfied with the input, they click on SAVE and the information will be saved to the database. If the information was successfully saved, the system will notify the user. The user can only add information about one body system at a time. If no input is provided by the user, but SAVE is clicked the system will advise the user to input information about the patient.

After clicking SEARCH INFORMATION in the main menu the user is
presented with four options. To review patient information, there are the following choices: the user can search by date, by body system or by nurse name. The user can also click a button to review the last four hours.

In order to find patient information for a specific time block, the user selects SEARCH BY DATE in the menu. Then the user selects a start and end date from the calendar by clicking SELECT and clicks SEARCH. The following screen will show the results for the specified time block. In case the time block is not valid, a pop up will notify the user.

The second choice allows the user to search for patient information sorted by body system. The user selects SEARCH BY BODY SYSTEM in the main menu. Then they select the body system for which they want to see the information. By clicking SEARCH all the information saved for this system appears on the screen.

The third option is the SEARCH BY NURSE NAME. The user can look up all the notes saved by a particular nurse. A list of all nurse names that appear in the database is presented and the user can select a name. After clicking SEARCH the results will directly appear.

The last options allows the user to review the last 4 hours. After clicking on REVIEW 4H SHIFT, the app will look up all information that was saved in the last four hours and present it to the user.