Software Engineering Showcase | Whakaaturanga Hanga Pūmanawa 2018

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SENG302 Project 2018

Product: Organ Donation Management System

The SENG302 project for 2018 focused on an organ donation system. In New Zealand, more than 550 people are waiting for a transplant of an organ/tissue. By transplanting healthy organs, lives could be saved and the need for long-term medical treatments could be lowered. Organ donations have the potential to give those in need a second chance at life and increase their quality of life.

Currently, when getting or renewing your New Zealand driving licence, you may register as a donor with your donor status noted on your licence. In 2018, more than half of New Zealanders having a driving licence were registered as possible organ donors. However, this amount is still considered too low. The NZ Ministry of Health has identified this gap and has put in place a national strategy to overcome this problem. The strategy targets key areas such as public awareness, media, donations, matching allocations, procurement, transport/delivery, transplant, and post-transplant care.

Unfortunately, there is also disparity in New Zealand with regards to individuals receiving (and donating) organs. Furthermore, issues such as organ and blood donation can have significant meaning, not only to those who require organs but also in light of customs, cultures, and beliefs. This requires discussions around this topic to include sensitivity and understanding.

Encouraging people to donate organs requires having a system where individuals feel like they have control over their donations. This includes easy registration with choice of which organs to donate, and the ability to change their minds easily and without penalty. To be useful, clinicians also need to be able to get information when organs become available. Most organs have a certain amount of time within which the transplant procedure needs to occur, putting an additional time pressure on clinicians. This means that clinicians need to know as soon as an organ becomes available, its location, and the number of hours it has before the organ becomes unusable. Ideally, they would also have some idea of the donor's history that may influence any decisions. For example, a donor may have registered to donate a heart but later developed a coronary disease. Certain medications and procedures may also influence transplant decisions.

Furthermore, when coordinating between donors and potential receivers, lots of constraints must be taken into account, like blood type compatibility, recipient priority (e.g. the time a recipient has been waiting for an organ), distance between the donor and receiver, and so on. All these constraints are often hard to sum up in an efficient and swift manner, so clinicians may need computer aided tools to help in their decision process when a transplant surgery must be planned.

In this project, the teams had to develop software where donors can self-register, those requiring organs can be entered by their clinicians, and where clinicians can search for potential matches.

Data privacy and security are highly critical in such a domain. In this project, the emphasis was put on increasing the awareness of this problem and creating an appealing software application with extended features.

From a common basis with a restrictive set of user requirements, the eight teams delivered very different and interesting pieces of software. Students learnt how to develop a professional product and add their own touch by proposing user stories, among others, graphical visualisations of donors in a certain geographical range, rewards for blood donation, mobile applications, or even a platform game to increase awareness/engagement and encourage donations

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