english -
portuguese
About the research and the prototype developed during the master's degree.
February, 2019 ~ November, 2022
Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina - UFSC
Centro de Ciências da Saúde - CCS
Programa de Pós-Graduação em Informática em Saúde - PPGINFOS
Master's in Health Informatics - Information and Communication Technology in Health/e-Health
Master's research project - Health Informatics and Neuropsychology
In Brazilian Universities the primary assignment for the conclusion of a master degree is scientific research. From the beginning the student must be able to identify and investigate a scientific problem through a set of methodological procedures. The research process is documented in the master essay that is evaluated in two moments: first in the project qualification where the the relevance of the scientific problem is highlighted. Second in the dissertation defense where is evaluated the methodological rigor and the interpretations of the results found in the search. In Brazilian Universities the master degree initiates the student in academic research and by the other hand contributes to the science to expand the knowledge necessary to understand a given scientific problem.
In my research, the goals were to investigate the feasibility of a hospital neuropsychological assessment management system that could both contribute to the neuropsychological hospital practice and digitizing, systematizing and centralizing neuropsychological data. I chose the Design Science Research methodology, so, the research required a complete design and software engineering process: i.e., requirement gathering to design, modeling and prototyping a system that fit to neuropsychologists in the hospital context. The functional prototype was developed with the frontend framework VueJs. Finally, this prototype was used to evaluate the feasibility and usability of the proposed system with the final users.
This idea came to my mind during my graduate degree in clinical neuropsychology (2018), when I was writing a literature review article on the uses of informatics by neuropsychology. I hope that someone who gets in touch with my dissertation could be sensibilize to do deeper research and help in questions about teleservice, electronic health records, interoperability, standardization of neuropsychological data, big data, machine learning, and so on... in the neuropsychology field.
The results have identified that a hospital neuropsychological assessment management system could improve the neuropsychologist practices. At first, I found that it is fundamental to develop a neuropsychological data transfer standard to avoid those systems developed from now being not able to share data in the future. Therefore, neuropsychology needs to invest more in scientific research to incorpore informatics and being closer to eHealth.
If this topic interests you, you can access my complete dissertation (written in portuguese) in the university online library. You can also watch a recording of my dissertation defense. And I’ll be available to discuss this research, contact me.
