Mobile application for monitoring physiological stress levels
ICT & Smart Mobile
Client company:Fontys Healthcare Department
Son Le
Nam Le
Hai Ngo
Andreea Maican
Tu Hua
Son Duong
Project description
This project aims to develop a mobile application that would measure the stress level of patients in a nursing home. The group working on this assignment needs to provide the caregivers with a user-friendly application that uses the Movesense sensor and platform to correctly calculate each patient’s stress level.
The assignment led to the following main question: How to develop a mobile application for caregivers using real-time data from a Movesense sensor to quantify the stress and medical condition of a patient?
To answer the main question, the assignment will be divided into four phases: first, our group will investigate and do research in this field to develop a good solution for the application. We need to analyze what is already provided from the Movesense platform and what needs to be fixed.
Then, we are going to design a prototype of the application that we want to build and check with the client for approval of the new user interface. Once the prototype is approved, we will integrate it within the application in Android Studio.
The third phase will focus more on developing the application and integrating all the algorithms for calculating the HRV, filtering the false heartbeats, and all the requirements we need to deliver as a group.
The fourth phase is going to be about testing and validation. Here we will perform the user acceptance testing to validate the requirements and check if the application meets the customer’s expectations.
Context
The Healthcare Technology Team from Fontys started research regarding wearable sensors to measure stress in order to help the nurses and the caregivers to monitor patients’ stress levels during the day in order to provide better care. This way, people who cannot communicate or struggle with it and get stressed because of that or other reasons (anxiety, aggression, unexplained somatic symptoms, dementia, autism), will be helped by the nurses once they see the patients’ stress level going up. Right now, the nurses cannot constantly measure the stress level of each patient which is why they need a new system. The nurses also do not like using technology or complicated software, hence the application that our team needs to build should be user-friendly and easy to use.
Results
Our application is able to deliver these functionalities below:
- Show live ECG and HRV data
- Show HRV data in a graph
- Show HRV data in the text box in the HRV tab
- Add and save events into CSV files
- Add new events to the Event list
- Run in the background
- Change the saved file name
- Choose time frame (30s, 60s, 90s)
- Filter false heartbeat
We also deliver the following documents:
- Design Document
- Advice document
- User Manual
- Technical Manual
- Project Report
Methodology
We use the DOT Framework to structure the research process in this project. It includes three levels: What, Why, and How with 5 strategies: Library, Field, Laboratory, Workshop, and Showroom. The main question is breaking it down into several sub-questions. Each strategy of the DOT framework contains activities to answer the sub-questions. Doing this gives a more precise direction and answers the main research question step by step.
We used:
Field strategy to:
- Explore user requirements + Interview: Frequent meetings among the team involved and the clients to determine the user requirements and analyze the project’s current situation.
- Problem analysis: Specify the main research question and related sub-questions
- Document analysis: Read and understand the source code, documentation from the previous group and Movesense
Library to:
- Available product analysis: Finding reliable open sources of documentation, available applications to get more information about Movesense sensors and its app.
- Expert interview: The client who also is an expert in medical health care problems will be interviewed to get an in-depth understanding of how stress levels can be managed by information obtained from a Movesene device
- Community research: Find out how existing applications make use of available data to manage the stress of a user. Available applications can be found on Movesense’s website, Play Store, and Apple store.
Workshop&Lab to:
- Prototyping +code review:
- Create a prototype of the app and review the code together
- Unit test + Component test
- Test the functionalities during each sprint
Showroom to:
- Product review: Have meetings with the client and tutor in order to demo and receive feedback
About the project group
We are a group of 6 students with ICT&Software and ICT&Business backgrounds. This project is called ProEP+ and it took a semester to finish
