Induction

This week we were assigned our project for the Systems Engineering module. Over the next 2 terms, we will be developing a solution to a real-world problem defined by our clients. We will cover every stage of the Software Development Life Cycle, starting from gathering requirements and Human Computer Interaction (HCI) to quality assurance of the project and presenting the final application to the client.

Over the past week, we got to know our teammates, met with our clients and got some understanding of the project.

Meeting the Team

After receiving the details of our project and team members, we created the Microsoft Teams team for meetings, Trello for the Kanban Board, Miro for visualising and mind mapping, and a GitHub organisation to host our project development. Team organisation went well and we should not have any problems reaching each other.

We agreed on the time to regularly meet on Teams and came up with several general questions to ask the clients during the meeting.

Meeting the Client

On the 20th October 2020, we had an introductory 40-minute call with our clients over MS Teams. Clients introduced the problem and shared the type of solution they had in mind. Clients described it as an FHIR-compliant data visualisation tool from Infusion Pumps.

Project

The main idea of the project is to visualise streaming Infusion Pump data on a customisable, user-friendly dashboard. Our client is GOSH NHS, so we are building a tool to help clinicians and parents monitor the treatment of their patients or kids.

Motivation

At the moment, there is no monitoring system in GOSH which would help clinicians to get insights into patients’ treatment and see if they are hitting the target amount of feed they are prescribing. When it’s on paper and the information is not digitalised, you tend to forget the bigger picture and lose crucial information on how effective is the current treatment plan.

Having a dashboard with customisable metric graphs of infusion pump data would help to evaluate the treatment plan of the patients by analysing the data over time with different metrics (such as rate over time, volume over time, etc.), get insights into the patient’s body (which plan doesn’t seem to work and which does), and makes the life of the clinician easier.

Solution

FHIR-compliant data visualisation tool from Infusion Pumps in a form of a web application. The authorised users will be able to log in to the system to visualise the dashboards of the patients they are treating.

Graphs and Charts must be customisable, having several different metrics, and with the ability to view the prescribed vs. actual rates of feed the patient is receiving.

There must be a high level of data security since we are dealing with medical information and clinicians/parents will only see the dashboards of patients they were assigned.

Next Steps

The system will be used in a clinical context, therefore, clients wanted us to get familiar with infusion pumps and asked to conduct primary research on different types of sensors used in infusion pumps and present the findings in the next meeting. Because of the busy schedule of the client, we agreed to meet biweekly on Tuesdays for an hour and asked for permission to record future meetings.

Shortly after the meeting, resources were shared to help us visualise the feeding pumps used in the UK for tube feeding children.

Overall, the meeting was productive and we understood the main idea of the project. However, it may take some time for the team to learn about infusion pumps and conduct the research that clients asked for.