The development of smart-phone-based home care evaluation support system

The purpose of this study was to develop a smart-phone-based support system for home care evaluation. An intensive prototyping approach was used for the system development. The system was composed of two key components: smart phone and PC. The content of the system was designed based on the Minimum Data Set Home Care (MDS-HC) in Taiwan from Resident Assessment Instrument Home Care (RAI-Home Care) assessment manual version 2.0. The Palm-based Treo 600 smart phones were used and the program was coded by the NS Basic for Palm 4.4.1. The Grid Snow-crystal-like information representation approach, a Workflow-enhanced version of effective interface design principles for PDAs, was used to design the PDA systems. The PC server was designed in VB 6.0 with Winsock module. The smart phone component of the support system was composed of 63 key screens, organized 18 categories basic information, and operational screens-with 262 information items.