iBie: an iPad app for patients affected by movement disorders

Jun 1, 2012 3 min read

iBie

During my bachelor degree in Biomedical Engineering I had a course of Basics Informatics, in which we had to study and learn C language. The professors gave also to us an opportunity to study C but in the same time exchange the paper final test with an evaluated project. The project consisted in an app for iPad developed in Objective-C with the aim of monitoring (while the patient stays at home) the evolution of movement disorders diseases. My group was also composed by other persons, like we can see from the image above. I acted both as group leader and as a programmer.

The app is composed of four parts:

  1. “Tapping button” task that is simply composed by two buttons that has to be pushed alternately as fast as you can. We count the number of pushes in 30 seconds and so we have got information about the evolution of the disease, related to the patient’ speed in the movements.

  2. “Line drawing” that is probably the most complicated part of the app. The patient has to draw on the screen a line as straight as possible. We analyse in frequency the components of the line. In dependence on the mayor frequency we find in the line spectrum we can say more or less how is the evolution of the disorder going.

  3. “Questionnaire” where the patient has to compile a form to comunicate daily how is he feeling. It’s a sort of list of questions that the physician would ask if he could be there. The answers are registered in the database so that the doctor can later see them.

  4. “History” is the section, accessible only if you have the correct authorizations, where are visible all the data of a patient with elaborations, graphs, evolutions during the time ecc.

All these contents are accessible only after a login. In fact, we thought also about the type of users that can access the iPad and differenciate the possibilities to use the app. For the physician, who we think is the most important person in the app together with the system administrator, is also possible a back up by mail of the database, with the possibilities of developing a Computer application to show better the results. I found a way, using Objective-C, to send the email without passing throught the Mail App of the iPad, so preserving the privacy of the data. I used the SMTP protocol in a script in Python launched by the application, so the database is never saved outside the app!

The project was totally approved and had a discrete luck; I and Benedetto Roda presented it in a convention about “Media Tablets & Apps For Personalized Medicine” as we can see from the image below. The presentation in PowerPoint is downloadable here.