GSoC 2020: Hybrid Mobile App

A great summer concludes now! Here’s the final report of my journey with OpenEMR in the summer of 2020.

Overview

The objective of the project was to develop a mobile application that can not only avail OpenEMR features to increase accessibility but can also unlock a large range of medical usage which needs image processing or hardware which can be found in the daily use smartphone. It is split into two repositories, openemr/app-golang-openemr contains the go server which can be used to create an independent WebRTC server and it also has an API endpoint for OCR. openemr/app-flutter-openemr covers the flutter hybrid app, also it uses the openemr/app-golang-openemr as a submodule. Installation steps for the project can be found at README.md

*Note: Links point to the commit made by end of summer(v2.1.1) instead of master.

Mentors

• Brady Miller
• Stephen Waite
• Rachel Ellison
• David Vu
• Asher Densmore-Lynn

Project Objectives

The primary objectives of the project were:

• In-App Telehealth (Completed)
• Medicine recognition (In Progress)

The secondary objectives of the project were:

• Barcode/QRcode scanner (Completed)
• Heartbeat Measurement (Completed)
• List and Add Patient (Completed)
• Extending chat support to OpenEMR WebApp (Future Work)
• Facial Expression Detection (Future Work)

Summary

This section contains the per phase summary of the work done, along with the links to the respective commits.

Phase 1

The first phase started with the search for the available tech, that can be used to achieve my goals. By the end of this phase, I was done with the Heartbeat Measurement, OpenEMR API integration, and prototype for Telehealth and Code scanner.

The commits are as follows:

• openemr/app-flutter-openemr
  • In the commit#Initial commit, I initialized the flutter project.
  • Then, A prototype for Code Scanner was added in the commit#QR Code scanner added.
  • Interface to list patients using OpenEMR API has been added in the commit#Updated Patient List View.
  • Prototype for Heartbeat Measurement was added in the commit#Added Heart rate module which was further improved in commit#BPM optimized and logout functionality in side menu.
  • Firebase was first introduced for telehealth in the commit#chat system using firebase.
  • Prototype for ML Kit can be found in the commit#apply ml kit on home page, it was further removed and only a part of it used for OCR.
  • Other commits include different experiments done before finalizing a perfect one for the use.
• openemr/app-golang-openemr
  • An endpoint for OCR has been added in commit:initial commit which uses tesseract-ocr.

*Note: Commits made under this phase are either experimental or prototype, hence I would not advise using any part of it for production.

Phase 2

In this Phase, I mainly worked on developing a production-ready front-end as the previous one was just a prototype. Also, the WebRTC prototype is added.

The commits are as follows:

• openemr/app-flutter-openemr
  • Under commit#UI Changed, WebRTC prototype was added which was further improved in webrtc fixed.
  • Final UI was developed which was pushed at the start of Phase 3.

Phase 3

All the prototype were cleared and production-ready implementation was added for the same along with the UI created in phase 2.

The commits are as follows:

• openemr/app-flutter-openemr
  • In commit#UI Changed, the first production-ready app with the new UI was released and all the prototype code was removed.
  • Then, OpenEMR endpoint was added back with updated UI and additional functionality(patient history and starred patients) in commit#Patient can be starred and history is being stored.
  • Firebase with all the functionality and documentation was added by end of commit#firebase chat is enabled.
  • Media sharing during the chat was added in commit#image sharing support.
  • openemr/app-golang-openemr repo was added as submodule under commit#added submodule which is used by Video calling feature introduced in commit#Added calling feature along with text recognition.
  • commit#New API support added the support for API for new OpenEMR.
  • Finally, under commit#Minor Improvements, the code was cleared and the error message has been improved.
• openemr/app-golang-openemr
  • WebRTC server has been added in commit#webrtc added which acts as a back-end for calling feature in the OpenEMR app.

Future Work

2.1.1 -> Current Version
2.1.2 -> Add Loading screens
2.1.3 -> Remove deprecated function
2.1.4 -> Error message based on API response
2.2 -> Medicine recognition
3.0 -> All OpenEMR API will be support

I thank my mentors and all the members of OpenEMR for being such an awesome and supportive community, it was a great summer of challenges, learning, and a lot of fun.