I am a Grad student at the Electrical Enginering Deparment that is getting his master in Electronics & Robotics. The main reason of taking this class was to get a better understanding in the Computer Communication Protocols and Decryption and Encryption.

My project is:

Palm OS Wireless Application, Prescription Pad for Doctors

Participants:
Aneesh Mehta,
Luis Jimenez,
Ted Belser

Application Description

The “Prescription Pad” application will allow doctors to write prescriptions at the point-of-care and send those prescriptions wirelessly to an online database.  From the online database the prescription can then be forwarded to pharmacies or other systems such as the hospital’s patient records system.  Such systems can remove many of the administrative steps involved with normal administrative activities.

Architectural Description

PDA application (Palm OS)

Palm PDA applications are based on the event-programming paradigm.  A Palm application consists of “Forms” and event-handling functions.  The event handling functions wait for events produced by the user, the operating system or an external hardware source.  All versions of the Palm OS following version 2.0 support the Net Library API needed to add TCP/IP functionality to a Palm OS application.  The Palm OS application can be divided into two layers.  The first layer is the graphical user interface and its associated Event Handling Procedures.  The second layer is the communications layer that handles all information transmission and reception through the TCP/IP protocol.

Online Server

The online server will manage all information traffic between the PDA devices and all other systems.  Effectively, it is a hub that consolidates all PDA communication into one point so that it may be placed in a central database and forwarded to any other systems as necessary.  In this project, the server will perform three functions.  First, it will manage communication with an individual PDA device.  Second, it will store that information into a MySQL database residing on the same machine as the server process.  Last, it will forward all prescriptions to a printer.  The online server will run as a set of Perl scripts within an Apache or Microsoft web server.

Database

The MySQL database will act as a repository for all prescriptions.  The database will also maintain a table of patients so that the doctor may effectively relate prescriptions with the patient effortlessly.

Project Breakdown by Person
Member 1
• Both layers mentioned above of the Palm OS PDA application.  (GUI and TCP/IP communications)
Member 2
• Set up of the MySQL database on the server.
• Perl Scripts to access and store information to and from the MySQL database
Member 3
• Set-up of Perl on the Host machine.
• Perl Scripts for TCP/IP communication with the Palm OS program.

References

Palm OS Developer’s Website
Palm OS Documentation
Also, there is a wealth of documentation for Apache, Perl and MySQL on the Internet.

Available Resources

Palm VII with wireless modem (cellular network)
Metrowerks Code Warrior Version 8.0
PC with a static IP
Apache web server for Linux or NT machines (free, GNU license)
Perl (GNU license)
 

Here are some pictures of the projects that I have work on:

Rat-Trap (on Red) & Rampage (on Bare Wood) ( Pic Size 1.0MB it was taking with a digital camara )