Patient Monitoring System

One project I've been working on recently involves the following:

• .NET application that listens to a legacy hospital system spitting out lab results
• SQLXML templates that enable extracting and updating a database of patients and results using a common XML format
• .NET Windows Application that hosts a Flash ActiveX object
• Flash movie that displays Patients, Lab Results and Test Results

The Flash app was the main area I worked on, to achieve my results I had to create my own classes, and extend some internal classes. I create an Event Broadcaster, a base Collection, a Debug/Trace object, and did some custom extensions to the internal XML/XMLNode objects to add minimal XPath support.

The end result with the initial prototype is that new Patients are added to an onscreen list (allowing for animation which will be added shortly), updates to Patients are handled (next iteration will add highlighting as a visual cue that an update has occurred), new Lab Results are added to the correct Patient, animating in (moving all existing results to the right) to provide a visual cue of the change.

It currently supports some simple scrolling, we'll be adding some smoother scrolling soon.

So, what's the end result of this? Doctors and Nurses in a Cardiac ward (and later other wards) will be able to see instant updates of Lab Results for Patients in an intuitive interface that is accessed using a touch-screen.

The users will not need any technical skill with computers, there's even a possibility of adding proximity detection (with the use of special cards Doctors can wear around their necks) that will allow a doctor to filter the list to just his/her Patients with a single click.

I think this application shows a good use of XML, Web Services, .NET (C#) and Flash MX to create an easy and intuitive solution to a real-world problem.

What do you think?