GSoC 2012 Ideas Page

Overview

Potential Google Summer of Code project ideas for 2012 will be listed here. Please write to raxa-gsoc@googlegroups.com (Google Group) with ideas for projects, and immediately edit the wiki to add you idea.

Project Ideas

Project: Lab Administration Pages

Brief explanation: The lab module is metadata driven, relying on a catalog describing available tests, the preconditions for undergoing them, the interpretations of the test results, the codes used for specimen types, result flags, specimen rejection and numerous others. Maintaining these tables is a system administration function, and the goal of this project is to implement a user-friendly interface for configuring the system effectively.

Used Technologies: The primary tools are jsp using jquery running under Spring MVC.

Mentor: r.friedman

Project: Lab Reports

Brief explanation: The laboratory module needs to generate a variety of reports: test results, daily log, exception reports, monthly statistics, quality control charts, etc. Some of these reports will be saved as PDFs and possibly printed, others will be exported to Excel or other tools. The lab module will also need a report and parameter selection screen.

Used Technologies: BIRT or iReport for report generation, Java for integrating the report generator into the module, jsp with jquery and/or HTML5 for the report and parameter selection screen.

Mentor: r.friedman

Project: Arden Syntax Implementation

Brief explanation: Adapt and extend OpenMRS' Arden Syntax implementation at Raxa EMR. The EMR has a data structure derived from OpenMRS on which we are creating point-of-care and after-care interfaces for both providers and patients. These interfaces will have intelligence, both heuristically-derived and data-driven, to provide support so that providers and patients can make evidence-based, informed decisions about their plan of care. These rules will be implemented using Medical Logic Module interfaces such as the Arden Syntax, so that the rules created here can be used by other such systems, and so that rules from other systems can be implemented easily here. During this project, we shall be creating the software interfaces to implement rule-based validation and suggestions during provider data entry and patient behavior.

Resources:

Used Technologies: Arden Syntax, OpenMRS

Objectives:

Familiarize yourself with the Arden Syntax as implemented in OpenMRS
Create service for Arden Rules (e.g. https://source.openmrs.org/browse/OpenMRS/branches/1.9.x/api/src/test/java/org/openmrs/arden/include/HiRiskLeadScreen.java?r=24212)
Create user interface using HTML5/Javascript/ExtJS4 that will allow non-developer users to create rules for the system on the backend
Add REST service to the backend to serve Arden Rules to module apps
Insert calls to the REST service in the Outpatient Module frontend code so that Arden rules can be followed

Primary Mentor: Surajit Nundy

Backup Mentor: Dr Rachna Kucheria

Project: E-Triage System

Objectives: Develop e-triage system

Reason: In rural areas of India and other similar parts of the world, patient-doctor ratios may be 10000-1 or lower. Alternative technologies are required to enable emergency response and for optimal connection of doctors to patients. The objective is to develop an IVR setup that patients can call into. The patients will be guided through a brief dialogue system that supports natural language queries and requests. The spoken input will be analyzed, and based on its contents, the system will automatically connect the patient to the optimal available doctor or hospital, where "optimality" will be decided based on emergency level of the call, distance of the patience to the doctor, the doctor's current load and other such factors. In cases of epidemics or other obvious illnesses, the system will also dispense emergency advice to follow before getting to the doctor.

Used Technologies: Open source speech recognition, dialog system and natural language processing tools.

Primary Mentor: Bhiksha raj

Backup Mentor: Rita Singh

Project: Medical Disaster Response

Objectives: Implement voice-based input/output modalities for a Disaster response system for Raxa

Reason: Disasters, ranging from medical disasters such as cholera or malaria, to earthquakes, floods, etc. require immediate response, access to information, etc. The objective is to adapt disaster management tools into the Raxa structure, with to implement voice-based mechanisms for populating the information databases in it via human input, in addition to current methods, as well as voice-based responses.

Used Technologies: Open source disaster response tools from sahanafoundation.org, open source speech recognition, synthesis and dialog system tools,Ushahidi

Primary Mentor: Bhiksha raj

Secondary Mentor: Rita Singh

Project: UI for Raxa EMR Analytics and Reporting

Objectives: To create an intuitive, beautiful, and easy-to-use interface for accessing information about the relationships between disease prevalence, geography, demography, the seasonality of illnesses and other contributing factors to health.

Reason: To make healthcare information meaningful, useful and effective in the service of providing better levels of care, providers need to quickly, conveniently access and analyze the data captured in an EMR. The objective is better evaluate treatment protocols, staged interventions and physician responsiveness to the leading causes of morbidity and mortality.

Used Technologies: Open source technologies such as Pentaho, I2B2, Sencha Touch Charts, Greenplum Chorus

Primary Mentor: Daniel Pepper

Secondary Mentor: Shuro Nundy

Project: JSS CHW Project

Background: JSS has an extensive community health outreach program in 53 villages, with 104 community health workers. Many are semi-literate, and request help with decision making. CHWs want knowledge in a particular format; many have an aversion to writen text and would succeed more with images and and audio. The platform must be appropriate.We are working with various technology platforms to provide a couchy feel of application for use by public health at Raxa

Objectives:

Develop a case management platform to allow for users to implement case management for common diseases in JSS
Implement MOTECH engine of connecting to openmrs for platform communication
Improve task management of community health workers

Added benefit: These are not core tasks, but will add a plus if implemeneted:

Implement Arden decision rules support for the mobile platform
Improving patient matching and record linkage strategies with the main JSS openmrs system.

Used Technologies: HTML5, Javascript, CSS CouchDb

Mentor: Judy Wawira

Backup mentor : to be decided

Resources:

Project: JSS Unsupervised Acoustic Model Trainer

Brief explanation: Most languages, especially the ones used in rural parts of the world, don't share the privilege with languages like English, French and Russian, of existence of vast quantities of freely available and carefully transcribed audio data. This forms a bottle-neck in creating a usable speech recognizer for decoding such languages. However, technology like this could form a potential backbone for any organisation providing support in rural regions. Hence, we want to make an unsupervised acoustic model training system that creates it's own database and an acoustic model from audio collected by JSS and it's supporting organisations.

Used Technologies and Prerequisites: CMUSphinx, Java, Machine Learning, CSS CouchDB

Suggested Reading:

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.18.2199

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1786947

Mentor: Apurv Tiwari

Secondary Mentor: Bhiksha Raj

Project: Geolocation and Mapping Tools

Brief explanation: Create a flexible tool to overlay useful data on a local village maps. The primary focus of this mapping task is to assist community health workers in finding patients and monitoring/updating village-specific data (clean water access, disease trends, landmarks). A major requirement is to emphasize that aspects of this data should be accessible and editable while offline (downloaded/updated while in WiFi areas). This work should be developed in coordination with the Analytics and Reporting project, to ensure maximum overlap in shared functionality.

Used Technologies: OpenLayers, OpenStreetMaps, GoogleMaps , Leaflet, Cloudmade

Mentor: Nathan Leiby

Project: Patient Medical Timeline

Brief explanation: This is basically an idea taken from facebook timeline. Just like we have the timeline in facebook, we could have a timeline of the patient's medical history. Reports like X-ray report, blood report etc will be attached to the specific point in history, which would make it easy to understand and access it, instead of having all attachments in either hard-copy or dumped in a single folder. Later in years to come, we can come-up with ideas to share/export data with other doctors, say for example the patient moves to city for better treatment.

Used Technologies: TBD

Mentor: TBD

Project: Disease Prediction via Machine Learning Algorithms

Brief explanation: Clinical data-warehouse that will store all information about the diseases occurred in a particular area, let say Bilaspur district of Chhattisgarh region where this system will be deployed. Understanding the pattern of disease, number of times a particular disease has occurred, reason why it occurred, preventive methods that doctors could implement in order to prevent the disease if it occurs next time. This will not only help in giving the best medical services in remote areas but also help administrators, doctors to be well prepared in advance to tackle the emergence of any kind of disease.

Used Technologies: TBD

Mentor: Suhas Deshpande

Project: User Interface for Outpatient Module

Brief explanation: A major emphasis of Raxa is great user experience, by building a UI based on web-standards and deploy-able across desktop, mobile, and tablet devices (where appropriate). Extend the work we've already done (e.g. in the Registration module) to build front-end interface for the Outpatient module, used to manage clinical encounters for every patient who enters the hospital.