Person-centred care for dementia patients (backend system development)

Abstract

Dementia refers to a group of disorders caused by abnormal brain changes. These changes often result in a loss of cognitive ability, severe enough to impair daily life. Although there is currently no known cure for dementia, research has shown that it is possible to reduce the risk of cognitive decline by adopting person-centred care for patients. However, this mode of caring has its limitations with the time and effort demanded from the caretakers to tailor a patient’s care to their interests, abilities, history, and personality. The PEAR (Person-centred care for dementia patients) system was developed to overcome the limitation by providing a platform for the caretakers to manage the information. The PEAR system consists of both frontend (mobile application) and backend(web client). The purpose of this project as part of the backend team is to maintain and improve upon the system inherited by the previous batches of students in terms of its performance. The author was able to achieve this by migrating the web framework from the deprecated ASP.Net Mvc to the latest ASP.NET Core framework. This framework merges ASP.NET Mvc and ASP.NET Web API, introducing the functionality of consuming web APIs from the web client. This migration was able to significantly reduce code complexity and improve the performance of the backend system. Additionally, both the database and the system architecture have been revised to reduce query calls and reduce code duplication.