| Adequate nutrition and hydration(NH)is essential for good health of hospital patients.Malnutrition and dehydration are related with delayed recovery,increased length of hospitalization and risk of mortality.There is consistent evidence that malnutrition is a widespread problem in hospitals across the world and that it is highly prevalent in affluent and developed societies.Based on many reports around the world,an estimated 13%to 69%of hospitalized patients are malnourished.In the UK,around 1 in 3 patients admitted to hospital will be malnourished or at risk of becoming malnourished.Dehydration is also common although the overall numbers affected are less clear.In community patients,malnourished patients visit hospitals all the more often and have more frequent hospital admissions than well-nourished patients.Research has shown the advantages of enhanced NH on health outcomes for malnourished patients,and can avoid these complications.Fighting malnutrition and endeavoring to diminish the intensity before it is too late,would truly be useful for patients' health.It is interesting to see that with the current monitoring systems of weekly in the hospital doing a nourishment risk screening,only can take action when undernourishment has happened.So continuous monitoring of consumption of NH(rather than weight)for all patients would be better.The most studies have been focused on the hospital/staff conditions and is not touched for the patient conditions,the lack of influence of patients to enhance NH,is specifically dealt with in this research where it can be supposed that a huge element in charge of the amount of NH for patients,is the patient himself.It must be possible to influence the patient to consume the right dietary needs.Information technology is a strong determinant factor as to the massive,immediate and low-cost deployment of nutrition-related interventions.As well the nutrition applications show the importance of behavior-based applications in patients'health preserve which can play remarkable role in motivate hospital patients to enhance NH for them.In view of this the researcher starts to develop the Idea of design a software application which has been generated that helps as a counseling tool for the patient in the hospital.The goal of this research project is to develop Nutr-Hydr application to fight malnutrition in hospital by enhancing NH for patients.The main contribution of this thesis is the first attempt to develop and test a nutrition software application for hospital patients to fight malnutrition in Yemen by enhancing NH.This research provides overview of perception by hospital patients about the importance of NH.Results show how they can benefit by using a nutrition application which enables the patients to learn how they should change their behavior to enhance NH that improves outcomes,lowers length of stay in hospital,reduces re-admittance rates and healthcare costs.As well this application enables the hospital patients to learn about their requirements energy by providing information about protein,carbohydrate,fat and liquids and getting their consumption of NH at the earliest time conceivable to their dietary needs,making it possible to show them how much more they need to consume to reach their NH goal.Data about what and how much the NH a patient has consumed can likewise be valuable for medical staff.The application has been implemented and tested in the Saudi German hospital in Yemen with 121 patients,only 17 patients fully completed the user testing;the number of users wasn't high because the project limitations in the area of testing the application.Results of test functionality of the user testing demonstrate no significant in change of NH.Yet,the results with a questionnaire are somewhat positive and show that patients found the application useful and it gave insight into their NH.This project is being developed based on a desktop application by using Microsoft Access that is a database management system(DBMS)from Microsoft that combines the relational Microsoft Jet Database Engine with a graphical user interface and software-development tools that supported by Visual Basic for Applications(VBA),an object-based programming language.This project has been developed according to Life Cycle Development Product concepts which are planning,analysis,design,and implementation.The implementation of this project has also been analyzed,while testing,limitations,and problems faced,as well as a recommendation for future work and enhancements are included in this report. |
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