IBD Tool: Enabling Continuous Data Export and Improvement of User Experience

IBD Tool is a web application born in 2020 from the collaboration between the research Center LINKS Foundation and the Mauriziano Hospital of Turin. The platform fits in the context of telemedicine: it allows the remote monitoring and treatment of patients suffering from inflammatory bowel diseases (IBDs), such as Ulcerative Colitis and Chron’s disease. These pathologies are slightly different from each other, but a common element is the fact they all present an alternation of phases of remission, where there are very few symptoms, and relapse, where the illness has a considerably hight impact on patients’ standard of life. In these conditions, a constant monitoring of the symptoms is crucial in order to prevent complications and telemedicine can surely offer a great support without forcing the patient to visit the hospital constantly: that’s where IBD Tool finds its goals. The web application allows the delivery of remote care, a type of health service that revealed itself to be necessary during Covid-19 era and that can make life easier for people with different needs that are not able to leave the house or to go visit physician frequently. Patients enrolled in this platform periodically receive questionnaires with specific and well-structured questions about their current state of health. The answers are then sent to the physicians that can evaluate the results and, if needed, act accordingly changing patient therapy or planning future face-to-face visits. This system creates a direct link between physicians and patients, who can also communicate through a chat system that is integrated in the web application. Furthermore, the platform offers to the physicians a section where all the data about the patients are available, this tool is useful to study incidence and evolution of the diseases. This thesis work is focused on the management of the web application and on the development of new functionalities needed by the physicians, they have guided the changes to be made. Technologies used are Angular for the Front-end and Java Spring Boot for the Back-end, while the data are stored in a MongoDB database. For the development and the deployment are utilized different tools such as Visual Studio Code, Heroku and Firebase. The objectives set in the definition of the work have been achieved and have led to the following results: -??Resolution of problems concerning the sending of emails. -??Insertion of a new export data function, that allows the physicians to collect data in order to analyse and extract information from them to better study the evolution of the disease. -??Improvement of the user experience, for the physician side, thanks to the introduction of several visual elements that enhance the usability of the platform.