Motivation to build this Application

Hi, I am Bhuman Soni and in October 2013, i was involved in a serious hit and run car accident from which i suffered a traumatic brain injury. As a result of the brain injury i suffered from a condition called Post Traumatic Amnesia. Basically at the time my short-term memory would last 5 seconds after which i would forget what i said and repeat myself. Seriously, my friends who spent time with me at the hospital kept a count of the number of times i thanked them for being there. So in a way, if you have seen the movie 50 first dates, i was like the character called 10 second Tom, except at that time i was 5 second Bhuman.Now during my recovery one of the first things i noticed was the process of evaluating the presence of PTA. The therapist would check for PTA by conducting an assessment as follows:

  • The therapist would ask me routine questions
  • Then the therapist would make a note of how i performed in the assessment using a pen and paper

Now being a software engineer, i could see a few problems with this process, problems such as:

  • Should the assessing therapist leave, then the replacement would have to figure out what the written notes meant or should the therapist loose the written notes the data would simply be lost
  • The information was simply being stored in its raw state, nothing was being done with it
  • If a patient does not speak/understand the language spoken by the therapist, then they would have to get a translator and speak the questions over the phone
So identifying this issue, the first thing i did after getting out of the brain injury rehabilitation centre, early Dec 2013 was to build an app to streamline the PTA assessment process. Listed below are some ways in which the app aims to streamline PTA assessment:
  • It attempts to overcome some of the language barriers and save the therapist's time in situations when the patient does not speak the language in which the assessment is being conducted
  • It visualises the stored information of the assessments in order to discover any trends in the data
  • The app is built to work on a device of any screen size, so instead of carrying a pen and paper, they therapist could carry a device such as a tablet
  • The therapist would always stay up to speed with what is happening in the ward, via notifications sent by the app

Very recently I met with a wonderful therapist who does PTA assessments on a daily basis and using her feedback, I am making some improvements to the app in order to make it a more relevant and easier to use for the end-user. If you want to know more about me and my background and experience, you can have a look at my LinkedIn profile. Alternatively a Google search about me should give you and idea of my published research in Computer Science for areas such as Artificial Intelligence as well as Computer Vision and Robotics.