CentraCare

Created by Mei Lin Chen, Zichen Jiang, Dave Nidumolu, Jimmy Wang, Shawn Wu
Shoutout to Debby Kaplan and Ron Beleno who provided enormous and priceless help during the hackathon! Inspiration

-- We built this at DementiaHacks Toronto 2015. The central theme was applying tech to all areas of dementia care and research including support for clinicians, institutions, persons with dementia, and researchers.

What it does

Our platform helps generate an electronic record of a person with dementia's social and medical history. This record will include information such as hobbies, interests, favorite music, medications, and degree of mobility. Using this information, new caregivers or members involved in the circle of care can seamlessly access everything they need to know to provide care to the person with dementia.

Why is this important?

Imagine you had to hand over the care of a loved one with dementia to a new personal support worker (PSW). Later that night, you realized you forgot to tell the PSW about how agitated your father with dementia can become and how very specific songs can calm him down. Alternatively, you're pestered regularly by your siblings about how your father is doing. By using our platform, you can ensure that all necessary information is transferred between relevant parties, thereby cutting out hours and hours of your time that would typically go into explaining these details. As an added benefit, caregivers can take a look at the information you gathered and use them to start a conversation - maybe they can ask your loved one about a particular hobby.

So what makes us different?

Long-term care homes gather similar information during the intake process, but this happens once your loved one has late stage dementia and you have less than a week to gather information and send your loved one to an institution. Our goal is to proactively start this information translation process right at the diagnosis. Not only will you gather richer information, but your loved one can be an active participant in the process of designing their own care. Unlike EHRs and clinical patient summaries, we focus on translating the social aspects of the person’s life, to provide the most personalized medical experience for the person with dementia. After an extensive search of the literature, we found that there is no tool that reaches our application’s capacity. Finally, we’re focused on providing a comprehensive, and holistic overview of care. We selected the questions in our record system by reviewing an extensive body of research, including initiatives spearheaded by the Ontario Ministry of Health. This positions us to provide richer, and more trustworthy data than what a family might record in a word document or notebook.

How we built it

We started with some simple ideas to connect caregivers. They then gradually developed this idea through brainstorming and discussing with different caregivers. After the idea is set, Shawn and Dave started drawing some mock up while Zichen implement it with HTML and CSS. Shawn, Dave, and Mei kept working on refining the idea and collecting data and feedbacks from caregivers, while Zichen started building the front-end with AngularJS and Jimmy started building the backend with Node.js. It was the first time for Zichen and Jimmy to work with a MEAN Stack, but despise the strugling, both of them learnt a lot about the development tools. We finnaly managed to build a prototype before the hacking stops, and spent the rest few hours resting and practicing pitching.

Screenshots

Challenges we ran into

We were really focused on building a practical solution that would help caregivers, so we spent a ton of time looking at research evidence and conducting market research. Our team had a lot of disagreements during the ideation stage as a result, but we came through in the end.

What we learned

We learnt a lot about dementia. I think my whole team now has a stronger understanding of the challenges found across the spectrum of individuals involved with persons who have this condition. It would be great to see where our ideas can go or whether we can come up with anything else that can support care for persons with dementia.

Through this experience, we have learnt so much about a particular group of people in need, who actually play big roles in some of our lives. Even though we had conflicts, arguments, and even fights over different opinions, but these proved that we are working together to solve a problem with different point of view. And also we witnessed how a wonderful idea can be cultivated during all these interactions. I truly thank you for all the efforts and sleeplessness you have put in during the weekend.

-- Zichen Jiang

I personally found that the dedication each of you put in was phenomenal. I regret for not being able to stay until the end, but the amount of work that you guys put in on this was beyond call of duty. I really had a lot of fun working with you guys and it was a valuable experience overall. Thanks guys!

-- Shawn Wu

I absolutely loved working with you guys, you were just an amazing team that was supportive of each other every step of the way (from brainstorming to running on little to no sleep). A big thank you to everyone on the team for putting in every last drop of effort to make this happen. Also, the fact that we came a vote away to being on top really shows that dementia caregivers see the potential in our product.

-- Mei Lin Chen

It was amazing to see how every unique skillset and viewpoint came together beautifully throughout the weekend. I learned so much from all of you and I hope that I'll have more chances in the future. Through all of the heated discussions, coding, and 12-7AM chats, thank you so much for everything you have done.

-- Dave Nidumolu

Built With

mongodb angular.js node.js express.js html5 jquery css3 javascript adobe-illustrator awesomeness hardworking sleeplessness