Development of a Database Driven Web Application: Health and Wellness in My Family

Abstract

The scope of the project revolved around the development of an online inventory tool which would help Issak Walton Killam (IWK) Health Centre understand the health of the community in a better way. The scope also involved informing community members about the health of their family. IWK Primary Health is making an effort to provide families with better programs to improve the health status in the various communities. The inventory tool will help the IWK analyze data to be used to build better programs for the future to help families in the community. Online surveys are conducted due to their various advantages like higher response rates, time and cost effectiveness, easy data collection etc. But they do have their limitations associated with them. They might have security and confidentiality issues related to them. People might not have easy access to internet etc. Keeping all the advantages and disadvantages in mind, the IWK Primary Health in collaboration with IWK Research Services built the questionnaire for an online survey- Health and Wellness in My Family. The team members had already developed the set of questions which the author had to transfer to the web server by the use of programming language like PHP and MySQL. The objective of building the survey application was that a score (red, yellow or green) is available immediately to the user after the completion of the survey. This would help them familiarize with the areas that are yellow and red in color and needs attention. Also, aggregate data could be accessed by the bigger workgroup about who has completed the tool and how they have responded (number of people, top red yellow green scores, relation of demographic data with other sections etc.). The application to provide data in .csv format so that it can be exported to SPSS for further research.