eCaring

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  Screenshots of the app demo

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✨ Inspiration

COVID-19 affected us all greatly, so we wanted to create an app that could combat some of the challenges it has brought to society. We brainstormed about some ideas, and the topic of long term care homes being heavily impacted by the pandemic came to mind.

We realized that COVID-19 has made it impossible for long term care patients to see their family, or to update them on how they're doing. Not to mention the long list of patients caregivers have, it must be difficult to keep track of them and constantly notify families on how they are doing. Many caregivers get late night calls from their patient's family members, and so this app can be extremely useful as nurses are already logging information and don't have to repeat themselves.

❤️ What does eCaring do?

eCaring is an iOS app that gives family members the opportunity to stay notified about their loved ones who are in long term care homes. The app allows for caregivers to log data about the patient's wellness, and it is uploaded for the family members to view.

Caregivers and guardians/family have different capabilities on the app. Caregivers have more control as they can log information about the patient, and access the unique friend code to invite the patient's guardian. Meanwhile, guardians can only view the information uploaded by the caregiver.

For families to sign up, the caregiver assigned to the patient must provide them with a friend-code. This allows for the family to be automatically assigned to their family member in long term care.

💡 How we made eCaring

To start, we brainstormed some pandemic-related app ideas. After landing on the idea of an app where caregivers can keep families in the loop, we did research by interviewing nurses and practitioners. This allowed us to obtain accurate information to build the app, making sure the wellness log was proper and we displayed data that families often ask nurses about.

We decided our roles for the project. Rachel designed the app and UI on Figma. Christine and Franklin split up the frontend, meanwhile Joon handled the backend. For the frontend we used react native and for the backend we used firebase (google cloud).

🧐 Challenges when developing eCaring

The hardest part about creating this app was linking our backend to our frontend. The backend was great and so was the frontend, but managing to connect these two parts together was a brutal task.

We also had a lot of challenges with the login, and getting it all to work out by fixing all the bugs.

🎉 eCaring's Accomplishments

Rachel is proud of the UI/design, as she is more used to designing for a younger audience. She is satisfied with how it all looks and she believes it fits the target audience.

Our group is very satisfied with the visual and technical outcome of the app. It all works quite seamlessly and is a great starting point for something great. We think that our app serves a great purpose given our current circumstances in this pandemic.

📝 What we learned

This was Franklin's first time using React Native, and he learned a lot from developing eCaring. This was also the first time Joon had a designer on his team. He learned that having a designer on the team is crucial, as they are able to create beautiful mockups for developers to follow.

🏆 What's next for eCaring

There were a plethora of features we wanted this app to have, but there wasn't enough time to implement everything. We wanted the caregivers dashboard to contain multiple patients and not just one, since in many caregivers will usually take care of more than one patient at a time. Similarly, we wanted the family member's dashboard to contain multiple patients in case they had more than 1 family member at a long term care home they were worried about. Instead of a friend code, we would have liked to implement an email link instead, so when a guardian is invited to the join the app, they get redirected to it in just one convenient step. One big feature we wanted was a chatting feature where the family member could message the caregivers. As well, they could even book meetings or video calls.

Built With

• figma
• firebase
• react-native