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CLIENT
RX MAXWELL
Rx MaxWell is dedicated to the prevention of disease and optimization of health and well-being.
Rx MaxWell is a team of expert physicians,
nurses, educators, psychologists and technologists employing the latest interactive,
multimedia technology to educate people and empower them to attain maximum wellness.
The company's goal is to enhance healthcare by teaching people how to take better
care of themselves. This includes helping them to make more informed choices as well
as positive lifestyle changes.
PROJECT
HYPERTENSION LEARNING MODULE
Our team designed and programmed an interactive multimedia
application that Rx MaxWell could use to teach people about their chronic illness.
A chronic illness is any that people have to live with for the rest of their lives.
While chronic illnessess such as asthma and hypertension are not curable they are controllable.
The application defines illnesses for patients, explains the causes or triggers which aggravate it,
the medications they may have been prescribed and how to properly take them, and any
lifestyle changes they should make to live longer, healthier lives.
APPLICATION
An easy to understand, entertaining, user-friendly program
For Rx MaxWell we developed not only the educational software, we also designed the
system architecture for their brick-and-mortar learning centers.
The client has plans to roll out many learning centers nationwide with each center made
up of multiple machines. One of the issues we were faced with was updating the
increasing number of locations with new content as new illnesses were developed. Another
issue was trying to keep the costs down without being stuck with obsolete hardware
in years to come. We decided to set up inexpensive NetPCs for each testing machine with
one local server at each location. The local server provided the content to each of the
NetPCs through IIS, which retrieved and viewed the Shockwave app through Internet Explorer
running full screen. This limited the updates to one machine per location. The local server
connected to a central server through a dial-up Virtual Private Network (VPN) to obtain new
software updates once a day as well as upload all collected data from that center every hour.
From the central server the client could run reports on the data collected as well as print
them out to send to each patient's doctor at completion of the program.
TECHNOLOGY
Modules are designed for CD-ROM or server-based delivery.
The application was written in Macromedia Director and developed as different modules to ease
expansion and utilize reuse. While our task was to develop only the hypertension
illness we knew there would be more illnesses to follow and wanted to make future
development easier without re-inventing the wheel every time. We did this
by separating the content out into XML datastores. By defining all of this content in
separate XML datastores we were able to reuse the modules
by simply having the modules reference different XML documents on a local web server.
Aside from the content being stored in XML all of the captured data—from demographics to
test scores—was saved in XML on the local server as well. Animations created in Flash add to
the user-friendly feel.
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