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TMS XData in a COVID-19 app: comments from the developer

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

Stephen Ball has recently posted about a new app released by the Military Institute of Medicine that is helping fight the spread of the global SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.

Stephen's blog post describes with more details what the application is about, so here I will mention how TMS XData - our framework to build multitier REST/JSON applications - helped the team to accomplish it.

The project is headed by Piotr Murawski (Ph.D, Head of ICT, Military Institute of Medicine, Warsaw, Poland) who shared with me some more interesting information in the (kind of) format of an interview. Thus I'm providing the content more or less how I asked him. I hope you enjoy it!

Q: Do you have interesting screenshots of the software?
A: I attached them, two from mobile application (Android), one form Epidemilogist’s panel and one from a Windows Services.



Q: Do you have any idea of how many users are using the software?
A: Until today the software has been used by 1515 users from hospital and others institution. These users send 18031 results of Medical Self-monitoring Card. Each card have 8 questions and four are connected with COVID-19.



Q: Do you have any idea of the number of requests per day (or hour, or minute)?
A: As You can expect there is not a statistical even distribution. In reality it is connected with the hours when people start or finish they job.



This is a long term distribution (until today), where the first registration was 15.03.2020. As You can see a the beginning was “test time” and the peaks are as Monday to Friday, which is understandable.

Q: Is the remote (cloud) communication only done with XData, or are there other frameworks/communication involved?
A: The remote connection is done only with XData for REST Services.

Q: Is the XData server a single one, or load balanced?
A: At the moment we use single instance of XData server but probably we will use load balancer for it in the future – an increase in the number of users is planned. As you can guess infrastructure and software architecture was designed to get as short answer time as possible. This is why some task has been done by the SQL Server procedures or triggers to.

Piotr kindly provided additional information:

" The infrastructure modules have a roles:

Covid Analytics Service: The analyse answers individually for every persons and qualified the answers to the group: white, yellow, red, dark red for an intervention;

Covid Core Service: authorization, result sending, user registration;

Covid Database Service: Database (TMS RemoteDB and TMS Aurelius – two versions) for an application for Epidemiologist to be possible analyze a data not only in a Institute but at home or other place too;

Covid External Service: Connection to the medical laboratory. If they get a positive result the lab can automatically create a record for a monitoring.

Covid Messaging Service: SMS reminder, for every person it is possible to set a different time between card what is expected. This service check this delay and if is greater than expected send a SMS by use of Microsoft Exchange and VoIP/SMS gateway. The messages are send from Moday to Friday from 7am to 9 pm every 2 hours, so it is motivated to send a card.

Application’s works on:

• For patients and other persons: Windows, Android (8.0 and higer), Mac OS, iOS. Because I still have a problem to put them to the Apple Store and Google Play there ae available from the Institute’s cloud;
• For Epidemilogy Department: Windows;
• Infrastructure: webservices and some servers for test and service debugging.

If we will think about productivity there was impossible to do without TMS Software. As you can see in the table the system cost 129 hours one man programming with help of UI Specialist and Medical doctor. "

I cannot thank Piotr enough, first for creating such a nice application that is helping in all this crazy times we're living, but also in providing such detailed information about his software, and ending with such nice compliments.

It makes us proud to what have done so far and give us confidence and energy to keep moving on and helping people all around the world to be productive and accomplish their missions!

Wagner Landgraf

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