SHAD ROI DE LA CRUZ: Hi, everyone.
I'm so excited to kick off this year's demo with DementiCare,
an app built with Flutter and Firebase
that's equipped with a wide range of features
to complement caregiving for people living with dementia.
Let's welcome the creators, Aishik and Ritik,
from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
ANNOUNCER: Dementia is a widespread disease
with over 17 billion hours spent for caring patients in the US
alone.
What's worse is more than half the carers
face substantial emotional, financial,
and physical difficulties.
DementiCare is a mobile app to complement caregiving
for dementia patients.
Here, we see the Caregiver Dashboard with access
to emergency contacts, sending urgent notices
to any patient using keyboard or microphone input,
tracking the live location of any patient using Flutter Maps.
We also provide productivity features,
such as calendars, reminders, and notes
for improved efficiency and accessibility.
The News section provides all local and international news
for dementia.
The Discussion Forum powered by Reddit
gives access to a large community
of carers and patients.
The Chat Room provides a community
of caregivers to interact and network
with for problem solving.
Our Health Chatbot, which can make appointments for patients,
retrieve information on diseases, conduct symptom
checking and triaging by using powerful machine learning
and natural language processing.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
And the Profile tab with access to
comprehensive real-time information
of patients and adding and removal of patients.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Now, we move to the Patient Dashboard.
There's the SOS functionality, which can trigger a call
as well as send an SMS to the patient's caregiver
directly from the app, even when a crash or fall is detected
in the background.
Play games to help exercise the brain.
Family Reminiscing with quick access to family members
and calling directly from the app.
The Memories section serves as a scrapbook
for the patient to record and store important memories.
Notices section displays all urgent notices
sent by the caregiver.
We have already started collaborating
with organizations such as ADA Singapore, Allium Healthcare,
and Jamiyah Nursing Home to enable
living through caregiving.
Thank you.
[MUSIC FADING]
ERICA HANSON: Hi, Team DementiCare.
Hi, Florina.
It's good to be here with all of you.
AISHIK NAGAR: Hi.
ERICA HANSON: Hi.
FLORINA MUNTENESCU: Good to be here.
ERICA HANSON: Awesome.
Great.
Well, Florina, I'd love it if you could introduce yourself.
And I know that you have a couple
of questions for the team.
FLORINA MUNTENESCU: Yes.
Yes.
So my name is Florina Muntenescu.
I'm an Android Developer Relations Engineer.
So, first of all, Team DementiCare,
I really, really liked your project.
I think it's such an important topic.
And actually, there was one specific thing I liked.
When I checked out the UI, I saw that the Carers and the Patient
section in the app are quite different.
And I liked that you paid specific attention
to the UX of the app, so thank you for that.
And now, I have a few questions for you.
So the first one is, what was the feature that was
most difficult to implement?
AISHIK NAGAR: Thank you for that, Florina.
The most challenging feature for us to implement
would be the different views for the patient and the caregiver,
and also maintaining the flow of information
from a single application.
We basically had to strike a balance
to keep the app immersive and simplistic for the patient
so that we don't confuse them.
But at the same time, we had to have it feature-rich
for the carers to provide the perfect services for them.
To give an example, during the early stages
of our development, we had made the application in a way
that the data flow had to be triggered manually
by the patient.
This meant that they had to click specific buttons
to send their location and device data and so on.
But when organizations and testers tried that application,
we realized this would only confuse the patient.
Based on this, we redesigned the entire UI overall,
making it full of visual clues for the patient
and automating patient monitoring features
into the background.
At the same time, we also reconfigured our cloud,
which is hosted on Firebase, to ensure scalability
for our users.
This allowed, for example, a single patient
to have multiple carers, which is quite
common for family-based carers.
Or we help shift-based carers to register and care
for multiple patients.
In fact, almost 100% of our testers
actively said that this was making
that experience much better.
So this kind of a flow of information
across the patient and the carer,
while ensuring differentiated views for them,
was definitely the toughest challenge for us.
FLORINA MUNTENESCU: Well, thank you for the answer.
And I really like the fact that you actually
listened to the users, that you integrated their feedback
in the app.
I think that's such a crucial part of building the product.
I have one more question.
So I remember specifically the SOS functionality.
Can you tell me a bit about how it was implemented?
Like what technology did you use?
And what were the things you had in mind when
building this feature?
RITIK BHATIA: Hi, Florina.
Maybe I can answer this question.
So the SOS functionality on the patient side of the application
is a simple yet an essential part of it.
So on the front end, we have a large SOS button,
which, when clicked by the patient,
will actually trigger a call to the SOS contact.
But actually, it was also quite important to factor
in the cases where the patient might
fall, making it quite difficult to manually click this button.
So in such a case, by using the inbuilt inertial measurement
unit of the phone, we actually detect the crashes
and falls in real-time.
And this helps trigger a call to the SOS contact of the patient
upon such a detection.
FLORINA MUNTENESCU: Oh, I see.
That's a good idea.
RITIK BHATIA: Yeah.
FLORINA MUNTENESCU: Sorry.
AISHIK NAGAR: So to also actually cover cases
where the SOS contact is unreachable via phone call,
we configured the SOS to send an SMS to them at the same time.
And this helped highlight the need for attention
from their end.
And to explain more about the technical aspects
of this feature, so, when deciding the libraries
to implement the call and the crash-detection features,
we had to take into account several factors,
like the efficiency of the package
as the SOS had to be triggered in real-time.
Then like the reliability and the uptime,
which we gauged based on the popularity and user reviews.
And finally, like support for sending an SMS as well.
So after research, we decided to use the Telephony package
to trigger a call to the SOS contact
since it was quite widely used and was recommended
by the community for its efficiency
and like ease of implementation as well.
And it also had support for sending
an SMS without opening a dedicated
application for the same.
And on the other hand, for the crash and fall detection,
we used the shake event plug-in, which was, again,
recommended for its ease of use and near real-time detection
capabilities.
Hope that answers the question.
FLORINA MUNTENESCU: Yeah.
Thank you.
Thank you for the answers.
ERICA HANSON: Awesome.
Thanks so much for sharing, and we
do want to bring in the audience questions.
While we're pulling up that question,
I do want to remind folks to please go to slido.com.
And you see the code at the bottom there, GDSC21.
Ask any questions you have for this team and all the teams
that are coming up today.
So we'll pull up a question for your team, DementiCare.
And that question is, where do you
see DementiCare going in the future?
What are some of the next steps?
And what does the future look like for DementiCare?
RITIK BHATIA: Sure.
Thanks for the question.
Maybe I can first like go ahead with this.
So for the future steps of DementiCare,
both Aishik and I have thought about
and classified into two parts.
Basically, the business development
and the technical development.
So as we already mentioned, we had already
started collaboration with many organizations,
like Alzheimer's Disease Association
in Singapore, Allium Healthcare, and Jamiyah Nursing Home.
And our plan for the future is to basically reach out
to even more organizations for the professional caregiving
services part of our application.
However, we had also made the application with the intention
to help the non-professional caregivers who might not
be associated with any organization.
So we also plan to make DementiCare
available to non-professional caregivers,
like the family members, et cetera.
So we plan to begin outreach to such members of the public
as well.
AISHIK NAGAR: Thank you, Ritik, for the business development
part.
Maybe I can explain more about what we plan to do technically.
So as Ritik mentioned, we want to keep
improving the applications.
We believe in continuous improvement,
so we want to add more features and refine the existing
features based on market feedback.
So some of the things which we plan to do
is actually collaborate with organizations
to adhere to PDPR guidelines and privacy guidelines,
because they are pretty stringent in the health care
sector, and we want to keep it as usable while
as privacy-preserving as possible.
And another thing which we want to do
is actually develop tools for migration and integration
of DementiCare into organizational workflows.
So this might include integration
with the existing databases or softwares, which organizations
or people might already have or some other tools which
we can develop for the same.
Yeah.
I think that that's our future plan for now.
ERICA HANSON: That sounds great.
That's really exciting, and it's great
that you've already started reaching out to organizations.
So great work.
And I used to live in Singapore, so I do miss it.
It's nice to see you all are based there.
I hope everything is going well there.
But thank you all so much for joining us,
and thank you, Florina.
It was really great to get to know your project,
and thanks so much for being a part of the Solution Challenge.
AISHIK NAGAR: Yeah.
It's pretty awesome here, so thank you so much.
FLORINA MUNTENESCU: Thank you.
ERICA HANSON: Awesome.
Thanks.
Bye.