MyCare Card Development: Portable GUI Framework for the Personal Electronic Health Record Device

In most emergency situations, health professionals rely on patients to provide information about their medical history. However, in some cases patients might not be able to communicate this information, and in most countries an online integrated patient record system has not been adopted yet. Therefore, in order to address this issue the ongoing project MyCare Card (MyC
²
, www.myc2.org) has been established. The aim of this project is to design, implement, and evaluate a prototype patient held electronic health record device. Due to the wide range of user requirements, the device, its communication interface, and its software have to be compatible with many common platforms and operating systems. Thus, this paper is addressing one of the software compatibility matters-the cross-platform GUI implementation. It introduces a portable object-oriented GUI framework, suitable for a declarative layout definition, components customization, and fine model-view code separation. It also rationalizes the hardware and software solutions selected for this project implementation.