Person-centred care for dementia patients (back-end and front-end system development)

Abstract

Dementia is a medical condition that causes a permanent impairment of cognitive functions such as memory and reasoning, affecting millions of elderly worldwide. The exponential increase in death rates associated with dementia highlights the severity of the disease. While individuals with dementia are suffering, it brings even more challenges to those individuals caring for them. Due to the demanding nature, taking care of dementia patients can be physically and emotionally taxing, leading to increased stress levels and anxiety. Furthermore, dementia care centres are facing a lack of manpower, making it challenging to provide adequate care for patients.

The Person-Centred Care (PEAR) system was developed to assist day-to-day operations of dementia care centres to allow stakeholders such as doctors, caregivers, supervisors etc to carry out their roles easily. The objective of this project is to maintain and improve the Back-end system with regards to code and software quality by fixing, implementing and testing the APIs. This is due to the migration from ASP.NET MVC5 to ASP.NET 5 Core where many features were missing or not implemented correctly. Thus, it is important to identify and fix the errors in APIs so that they can be ready for integration.

This report highlights the difficulties encountered during the development of this project, namely understanding the Back-end system architecture, comprehending the inherited codebase and the incomplete testing of APIs. The author moves on to explain the solutions implemented to tackle the challenges. This report concludes by providing suggestions to future developers on maintaining the Back-end codebase and implementing/fixing necessary APIs that have yet to be addressed.