Mobiilse farmatseutilise infokeskkonna arendus

Abstract

For almost a decade the medicine and pharmacy database/search engine http://www. raviminfo.ee has been available on the web. I am the author of that web-site and it has been nice to see that the popularity of the site is constantly growing. More and more people are using it as the Estonia’s best source for getting information about drugs and other products sold in pharmacies. As almost every person is using mobile phone and more and more people are using smart phones, the only logical continuation for developing that site further was to create a native mobile application. As pilot platform we chose iOS - Apple’s operating system for all the mobile devices like iPhones, iPod Touches and iPads. The main reason for developing the application for iOS was my interest in smart phone niche and in Apple devices in particular. Further more, as I was also leading and developing similar project (LasaLara learn- ing environment for the iPhone) for the course Software Project, it seemed logical to go on with the chosen path and create another useful application that every person could use. There are two main reasons for using the original raviminfo.ee web-site. First one is to get information about pharmacies, like where they are located and what are their opening hours and other contact information. Second one is searching for the medicines from the pharmacies together with the price information as well as all the detailed information about these medicines. Implementing these two functionalities was also the main scope for the mobile application. However, since mobile devices are more limited, especially in screen sizes compared to regular computers with large screens, the main difference is the data presentation. I had to make compromises for fitting all the needed data into small screen of the mobile phone. In addition, as mobile devices often have GPS built-in this gave an interesting possibility to be able to show users information about the nearest pharmacies, to make the user experience even more comfortable and pleasing. This thesis is divided into four chapters. The first chapter gives an overview why such a mobile application could be useful and describes some of the similar mobile applications available on iOS. The second chapter contains the requirement analysis for the application. In the third chapter the design and implementation of the application is described. In the fourth chapter a short end-user manual is available to give a brief overview on how to use the application.