Poverty Management App and Hospital Text Platform

Abstract

There are two parts of this honors research: designing an Android App for managing daily finances to avoid poverty, and a text platform for patients who have left a hospital after being admitted for a suicide attempt.

The Android App is designed especially for poor people to help them manage daily income and living expenses. This app will contain a cover page, information input page, income and suggested spending plots, a suggestion page, as well as a user manual. Users have to input daily income, and desired wealth and daily expenses, then they will be given a suggestion page that contains the suggested living expenses which is calculated by a proportional-integral-derivative controller (PID controller). Furthermore, all information will be stored and the user can choose to plot these data for analysis. The integral and derivative parts of the PID controller will be treated as discrete functions and specified by previous inputs of the user. This app will be implemented by Phonegap, which is a mobile development framework, using web application technologies like HTML, CSS, JavaScript as well as Jquery. The data will be stored using LocalStorage, which is given by the PhoneGap API. The PID controller is implemented by JavaScript with local stored data and plot functions executed by jqPlot. The text platform for hospitals is designed for reminding patients about their appointments as well as psychological suggestions for patients to help prevent suicide. This platform will contain a log in system, which provides limited access to protect the security of the patients' information. The user (health care professional) can input specific messages and choose the patient to send the information to. This platform is a web application and implemented by HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Ruby on Rails. The function of sending SMS to cell phones is implemented by Rails mailer.