Mr. Doc: A Doctor Appointment Application System

Abstract

Life is becoming too busy to get medical appointments in person and to maintain a proper health care. The main idea of this work is to provide ease and comfort to patients while taking appointment from doctors and it also resolves the problems that the patients has to face while making an appointment. The android application Mr.Doc acts as a client whereas the database containing the doctor’s details, patient’s details and appointment details is maintained by a website that acts as a server.

Full text

Mr. Doc: A Doctor Appointment Application System
Shafaq Malik, Nargis Bibi, Sehrish Khan, Razia Sultana, Sadaf Abdul Rauf
Department of Computer Science
Fatima Jinnah Women University
Rawalpindi, Pakistan
Shafaqmalik94@gmail.com, nargis@fjwu.edu.pk, sehrishkhan693@gmail.com, razia141@hotmail.com,
sadaf.abdulrauf@gmail.com
Abstract--Life is becoming too busy to get medical
appointments in person and to maintain a proper health care.
The main idea of this work is to provide ease and comfort to
patients while taking appointment from doctors and it also
resolves the problems that the patients has to face while making
an appointment. The android application Mr.Doc acts as a client
whereas the database containing the doctor’s details, patient’s
details and appointment details is maintained by a website that
acts as a server.
Keywords: Appointment, online application, android, hospital,
scheduling, track, healthcare
I. INTRODUCTION
If anybody is ill and wants to visit a doctor for checkup,
he or she needs to visit the hospital and waits until the doctor
is available. The patient also waits in a queue while getting
appointment. If the doctor cancels the appointment for some
emergency reasons then the patient is not able to know about
the cancelation of the appointment unless or until he or she
visits the hospital. As the mobile communication technology
is developing rapidly, therefore, one can use the mobile’s
applications to overcome such problems and inconvenience
for the patients. There is much work in the literature in this
regard [1-14]. An intelligent agent based appointment system
has been proposed in [1] in which a scheduling system is
provided for patients. The junior medical staff schedules
appointment according to the priority level. [2] proposed an
Android application that is used to remind the patients of their
dosage timings through Alarm Ringing system so that they
can stay fit and healthy. Searching doctors and hospitals
alongwith navigation details are also available in the app so
they can get proper treatment on time. [3] proposed an android
based appointment management system which uses
application programming interfaces (APIs) from Google map
and calendar. This appointment based application can be used
with other appointment based systems. The mobile
application accepts appointments by saving the record of the
appointment on the phone calendar which is synchronized
with the Google calendar. The user gets an alert based on
preset specified time before the appointment time and date.
[4] proposed a Health Track system that communicates with
sensors via smart phone for data collection, and stores data
concurrently to the central server for further analysis via the
internet. Some online systems that are already functional still
have some drawbacks. To overcome these drawbacks an
online patient appointment system is proposed using Near
Field Communication (NFC) technique and Android enabled
mobile application. This system works by registration and
scheduling appointments based on NFC that accesses
patient’s health records and reports to alert nurses and doctors.
There is another interesting work which is Disease Self-
inspection and Hospital Registration Recommendation
System (DSRRS) [6]. It uses Representational State Transfer
(REST) style for communication interface between reasoning
service and the system. Before reasoning users disease history
is retrieved from Personal Health Record (PHR) and passed
as an input to reasoning service. Mainly the input contains
User’s information, disease history, Knowledge base
(symptoms) and output of reasoning service. [7] described an
android smart phones and tablets application that is freely
downloadable from Google play store and it provides various
functionalities including personnel medical records, to trace
position of actual user in real-time. Routing algorithm is used
to find minimum distance for destination building. Another
study consists of an online database for the monitoring of
patient with artificial heart [8]. This database consists of
monitoring terminal that is portable and keeps continuous
record of a patient including history. There are other studies
which involve handheld healthcare [9, 10, 11] and efficient
algorithms for appointment scheduling including self-
inspection [12, 13, 14].
The proposed work in this paper is an Online Hospital
Management Application that uses an android platform that
makes the task of making an appointment from the doctor
easy and reliable for the users. Android based online doctor
appointment application “Mr. Doc” contains two modules.
One module is the application designed for the patient that
contains a login screen. The patient has to register himself
before logging in to the application. After logging in, the
patient can select a hospital and can view the hospital details.
The patient has the option of selecting a doctor from the list
of doctors and can view the doctor’s details. The patient can
request for an appointment on his/her preferred day/time. The
selected day/time slot will be reserved and patient will receive
the notification of the successfully added appointment. The
patient can view the location of the hospital on map. In
addition, the patient can contact to the hospital and the doctor
by making a call or may send an email to the doctor.
The second module is the admin module that is designed
on the website. The admin views all details of doctors and all
appointments by the admin. The admin can add doctor, view
patient’s details and doctor’s details and can view
appointments also. All the doctors of the specific clinic are
registered by the admin. Doctors cannot register themselves.
Rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II
explains the design interface and the tools which have been
used. Section III discusses the implementation and
screenshots. Section IV concludes the paper.
II. DESIGN INTERFACE
The front end design is simple and user-friendly. Once the
application is started the patient will register himself and then
he will be able to log in into the application. The patient can
make an appointment by selecting the preferred doctor, date
and time. The appointments are managed by the admin
through a website. The admin also registers a doctor. Admin

is able to view doctors, view patient’s records and view
feedback also. The back end design includes a server which
acts as a centralized database. All the data of the registered
doctors and patients and the data regarding the appointments
are placed on the server. The data is approached and shared
by using API’S between the website and the android
application.
A. ANDROID
Android is an open source operating system which is
Linux based and android platform is used to develop many
useful applications for the mobile devices that makes the tasks
of everyday life easy and faster. The android platform also
provides built in database (SQLite database) and Web
services. Android platform provides connectivity between the
server and the application using certain APIs, hence the task
of making a doctor appointment using a mobile application
connected to a website located on the server becomes easy
using the advanced features and libraries available on the
android platform.
B. SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT TOOLS
The following software tools were used during the
development process.
 Android studio 2.1.1 and SDK plug-in
 JDK 6
 Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) installed packages
 Ipage Server
 HTML
 Php
Figure 1: Block diagram of the appointment application
III. IMPLEMENTATION
The user will firstly downloads the application and install
it in their mobile devices. Figure 1 shows the block diagram
of the application. Once installed, this application will remain
into the device permanently until the user deletes it or
uninstalls it. After the installation when the user clicks on the
app icon, the first thing that will appear on the screen is splash
screen that contains the application’s logo as shown below
Figure 1 showing the splash screen
The patient will have to register in the application on first
use. After registration, the patient will receive a username and
password. For sign up, the user has to fill the given fields that
are username, email, password and confirm password and
then the user clicks on the signup button to register itself and
then all the information provided by the user is saved in the
database located on the server. The signup screen is shown
below
Figure 2: The Signup screen
If the user registers successfully then a notification
message “successfully registered” is displayed as shown
below

Figure 3: User registered successfully
Different checks are also maintained while registering the
user. If both the passwords are not matched then the user will
be notify that the “passwords didn’t matched” as shown below
Figure 4: Passwords didn’t match
And if email is not valid then the user cannot register itself
and a notification will displayed that “email is not valid” as
shown below
Figure 5: Email is not valid
The patient has to use this username and password for
logging into the app for each time usage. For signing in the
user has to provide the registered username and password
otherwise if the user enters such a username or password that
is not registered then the user will get a notification message
that “Signin failed check your connection or contact support”
as shown below
Figure 6: Sign in failed
After logging in, the menu screen is displayed containing
different option like hospitals, doctors, health schedules,
about and sign out as shown below

Figure 7: The menu screen
If the patient selects the hospitals option then he/she can
view a list of hospitals. Then the patient selects the particular
hospital and then he can view the hospital details as shown
below
Figure 8: The list of hospitals
Figure 9: The hospital details
Patient can contact to the hospital by making a call by
clicking on the hospital phone number as shown below
Figure 10: The user calling to hospital
The patient can select any particular doctor and view his
profile by clicking on the available doctors or by selecting the
doctor’s option from the menu screen. The list of the available
doctors is displayed as shown below

Figure 11: The list of doctors in the selected hospital
Figure 12: The selected doctor details
Patient can contact the doctor by making a call by clicking
on the doctor’s phone number or patient can also sends an
email by clicking on the doctor’s email as shown below
Figure 13: The user sending email to doctor
Figure 14: The user calling the doctor
By clicking in the book appointment button, a calendar
and different available time slots are displayed on the screen.
The patient has to send a request for appointment by selecting
a day or time. The central database gets updated accordingly.
The user will get notification message of “successfully added”
if the appointment is successfully registered in the database as
shown below

Figure 15: The selected day & time slot
Figure 16: The appointment reserved successfully
By clicking on the “get directions on map” button, the
location of the hospital is displayed on the screen using the
Google maps as shown below
Figure 17: The user can see the hospital location
Figure 18: Showing the hospital location
By clicking on the health schedule option, the screen
containing different health schedules of different age groups
is displayed as shown below

Figure 19: The different options of health schedules
By selecting the particular option, the health schedule of
that age group is displayed i.e if user selects the childhood
schedule then it is displayed as shown below
Figure 20: Showing the health schedule
The About option on the menu screen shows the
application’s objectives and the developers of the application
is displayed as shown below.
Figure 21: The About screen
The patient gets logged off by clicking on the sign out
button on the menu screen. Another module of this system is
located on the website. Admin logs in and then he can add a
doctor. Admin can view the doctor details, patient details and
the appointment details. Data is shared between both the
website and application by using APIs. The screen shots of
the website are shown below
Figure 22: The main page of the website

Figure 23: The login page for admin
Figure 24: The admin portal
Figure 25: The form to add a new doctor
Figure 26: Showing the details of added doctors
Figure 27: Showing the details of registered patients
Figure 28: Showing the appointments of the patients

IV. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
The proposed online appointment system has been
implemented in android studio for application development
and website is developed using HTML and PHP. The tasks
involved in this work are divided into modules. The data is
approached and shared by using API’S between the website
and the android application. The proposed system is efficient
and has friendly user interface. Addition of the admin and
doctor modules in the android application are included in
future work. That would help the doctor to register on the
application and perform all the tasks on the app. The admin
would be able to use the app for managing the details of the
patients and the doctors instead of using the website. A
payment or some amount may be charged to the users/patients
while making an appointment to avoid the unethical users. As
many users only register themselves just for fun and has no
concern by making an appointment. Some more future
directions are the improvements in the patient’s module which
includes setting reminders for the appointments and saving
the appointment date to the calendar.
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