ADVANCEMENT OF BLOOD DONATION APPLICATION, NOVEMBER 2015 1 Advancement of Blood Donation Application Chetan Sundarde, Suhani Jain And Eram Shaikh Department of computer engineering, Sinhgad College of Engineering, Pune, India-411041. Abstract—Blood is saviour of all existing lives in case of emergency needs such as accidents, operations etc. which creates an immediate and critical need for specific blood types. Also blood donor information should be checked before donation. Blood-donors usually dont come to know about the need for blood. We propose blood donation applications for cross-platform mobile platform such as Android,WindowsPhone, IOS etc. using Apache Cordova Framework. Apache Cordova is a platform for building natively installed mobile applications using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Using single source code to develop application for different mobile platforms. Allows users to locate donation clinics and view time slots, so they can make appointments and be reminded of them afterwards. Use of game mechanics makes it more interesting to user. Aim is to motivate donors to donate blood by applying game design and making apps for crossplatform mobile application. Index Terms—Cross-Platform Mobile Application, Apache Cordova, Blood Donor, Game Mechanics I. I NTRODUCTION N spite of the availability of the potential blood donors not more than 5% of the total Indian population donates blood. Blood-donors usually dont come to know about the need for blood, and there is a need to satisfy and motivate these blood donors. For better communication between department of blood centers and hospitals, to satisfy blood necessity, to buy, sale and stock the blood, to give information about this blood. Also there is need of run-time donors. These are the reasons that motivate us to develop a more efficient system that will assist the present blood donation system. Currently, the public can only know about the blood donation events through conventional media means such as radio, news paper or television advertisements. Even if there is electronic means, it is only used to publicize about that hospital or medical center blood donation drives provided if that hospital or medical center is having an online portal. There is no nation wide information regarding the blood donation drive available on any of the portal. Besides, for those who want to make blood donation, they cannot make early reservation or booking on the session and day that they are free online. It is a very important facility for those who are very busy and yet enthusiastic people to know and be sure when they can make blood donation rather than trying to figure out where and when they can make blood donation when they are free. There is also no centralized database used to keep the donors records. Each blood bank is having their own records of donors. If a donor makes donation in different hospital, no previous records can be traced except if the donor brings along the donation certificate. Hence, the donor is considered to be a first-timer if they make blood donation in a new place. Without an automated management system, there are also problems in I keeping track of the actual amount of each and every blood type in the blood bank. Man-made error such as forget to record the usage or input of the blood can cause the inaccuracy in the amount of certain blood type available in the blood bank. In addition, there is also no alert available when the blood quantity is below its par level. II. LITERATURE SURVEY A. Blood donor apps around the world There are certainly many apps that seek to assist either blood donors or transfusion professionals by healthcare services around the world. Here are some more of them: • • • • • • The Canadian Blood Services has GiveBlood (Android and iOS) for ”Canadians looking to save lives,” available in English and French. It allows users to locate donation clinics and view time slots, so they can make appointments and be reminded of them afterwards. There is also NHSGiveBlood (Android, iOS, ’Windows Phone) by NHS Blood and Transplant, for blood donors to search donation centres and make appointments, about which they’ll be reminded. It also allows users to share their activity on Facebook and Twitter. The American Red Cross (RedCross) has Blood Donor (Android, iOS), which apart from schedule donations and track donation history, also allows users to invite friends on the ”lifesaving team.” Through this app, the American Red Cross seeks to ”help meet the constant need for blood.” Bloodline (a platform as well as an Android app), developed by alumni and students at the Indian Institute of Technology of Madras, seeks to make a rather chaotic system more effective. It allows users to both request and donate blood: to the former, it only shows the blood truly available and donors that are ready to give blood, to the later, it only asks blood when there is a real demand of their blood. While GiveBlood.IE (Android, iOS) by the Irish Blood Transfusion Service (IBTS), allows for several functionalities: location or date-based clinic finder, blood supply levels indicator, information for the donor (eligibility and IBTS information), notifications, and it allows to share and to provide feedback. The last one is another blood donation app developed in Catalonia: Donem Sang(Android, iOS), created by the Catalan Federation of Blood Donors and developers USEIT. It localises where the nearest mobile or static blood donation centre is, and stablishes the users’ route there. ADVANCEMENT OF BLOOD DONATION APPLICATION, NOVEMBER 2015 2 It also provides advice and information on blood supplies from different blood types. B. Apache Cordova/PhoneGap PhoneGap was donated to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under the name Apache Cordova and hence is an open source distribution of Apache Cordova. PhoneGap is an open source framework for quickly building cross-platform mobile apps using HTML5, JavaScript and CSS. Targeting multiple mobile platforms requires knowledge of different languages/frameworks; PhoneGap solves this by allowing the developers to build mobile applications for different mobile platforms using the already familiar standards-based web technologies [1]. Apache Cordova/PhoneGap provides a set of JavaScript APIs which allows the developers to access the native platform and devices features like camera, accelerometer, contacts, etc using JavaScript. Basically there will be uniform platformspecific JavaScript libraries that can be invoked. This will in turn invoke the devicespecific native backing code for those JavaScript libraries making possible the use of platform and device specific features. Since the apps are built without any native code and using the standard web technology stack which are consistent across different mobile platforms, the basic codebase remains the same and should be portable to different mobile platforms with minimal to no changes [14]. Of course, these apps are packaged as native apps for each targeted platform using the platform specific SDKS and tool chains and can be made available for installation from each devices app store. UI framework such as jQuery Mobile or Dojo Mobile or Sencha Touch can also be used and combined in the app development. Advantages of PhoneGap: • Supports 7 Platforms (Apple, Android, Windows, Blackberry, Symbian, Bada, webOS) • Single Standards compliant UI language (HTML5, CSS, Javascript) • OpenSource (Extending and developing plugins or modifying is easy and accessible) • Support Packages Available for Developers • Developed by Nirobe (ex Novell developers and purchased and supported by Adobe). • Free (Open Source) III. C ORDOVA A RCHITECTURE Apache Cordova/PhoneGap is really a hybrid development platform, neither being truly native, nor purely web-based. All layout and rendering is done via the Web View. See Fig.1 Fig. 1. Architecture diagram platform. Plugins are written in each platforms native language and development environment. If there isnt a plugin that does what youd like to do with your device already, youll need to revert back to writing native code for each supported platform. IV. G AMIFICATION D ESIGN Gamification is the process of game-thinking and game mechanics to engage users and solve problems. Gamification is the concept of applying game mechanics and game design techniques to engage and motivate people to achieve their goals. Gamification taps into the basic desires and needs of the users impulses which revolve around the idea of Status and Achievement. The research company Gartner predicts that by 2015, a gamified service for consumer goods marketing and customer retention will become as important as Facebook, eBay, or Amazon, and more than 70% of Global 2000 organizations will have at least one gamified application. A. Techniques Gamification techniques strive to leverage people’s natural desires for Competition, Achievement, Status, Altruism, Community Collaboration, and many more. Businesses can use Gamification to drive desired user behaviors that are advantageous to their brand. One common technique of Gamification is to increase engagement by rewarding users who accomplish desired tasks. Rewards such as Badges and Points are used to elevate Status by showcasing the talents, expertise, and accomplishments of users. Competition is another technique that can be used in gamification. The desire to appear on the leaderboard drives players to complete more tasks, in turn fueling deeper engagement. B. Game Mechanics Elements PhoneGap strives to provide a common API set which is typically unavailable to web applications, such as basic camera access, device contacts, and sensors not already exposed in the browser. To develop PhoneGap applications, developers will create HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files in a local directory, much like developing a static website. Extending the capabilities of PhoneGap is via the use of plugins for each supported 1) Points Points are important regardless of whether their accumulation is shared among players, or even between the designer and the player. When you first consider a point system, you might immediately think of a goal in a sporting event, redeemable points in a video game, or bonus points awarded to players for successfully completing special tasks within a game. See Fig.2 ADVANCEMENT OF BLOOD DONATION APPLICATION, NOVEMBER 2015 Fig. 2. Lives as Points 3 Fig. 3. Leaderboard of teams 2) Levels In most games, levels indicate progress though they are not as exclusive in this role as they once were. For example, in the arcade game Ms. Pac-Man, levels are clearly expressed by the color of the ghosts, the layout of the maze, and the kind of fruit that loops around the maze. 3) Leaderboards The purpose of a leaderboard is to make simple comparisons. Unsurprisingly, most people dont need any explanation when they encounter a leaderboard. By default, we see an ordered list with a score beside each name, and we understand that we are looking at a ranking system. See Fig.3 4) Badges Badges are an excellent way to encourage social promotion of their products and services. Badges also mark the completion of goals and the steady progress of play within the system. See Fig.4 5) Challenges Challenges and quests give players direction for what to do within the world of the gamified experience. After all, how much fun would a scavenger hunt be if you were told to just go and find some stuff? Nothing specificjust Fig. 4. Badges and Rewards ADVANCEMENT OF BLOOD DONATION APPLICATION, NOVEMBER 2015 stuff. There isnt much of a challenge there. There is zero intrigue and an absolute lack of structure. 6) Onboarding Onboarding is the act of bringing a novice into your system. It is a carefully calculated way of thinking about how someone goes from zero to five miles per hour without crashing his car. Although there is a standard web design way of looking at onboarding (throw a huge number of options at a player to make sure he does something, anything) the game view is very, very different. 7) Social Engagement loops In a social engagement loop, a motivating emotion leads to player re-engagement, which leads to a social call to action, which flows to visible progress and/or rewards, which loops back around to a motivating emotion. 4 [14] R.Vanitha,M.E, P.Divyarani, BCloud App: Blood Donor Application for Android Mobile International Journal of Innovations in Engineering and Technology (IJIET), Vol. 2 Issue 1 February 2013. [15] A.M. Mostafa, A.E. Youssef and Gamal Alshorbagy ”A Framework for a smart social Blood Donation System Based on mobile cloud computing” Helwan University, Cairo, Egypt, JUNE 2014 [16] Sultan Turhan, ”An Android Application for volunteer Blood Donors” Department of Computer Engineering, GalatasarayUniversity, istanbul, TURKEY, 2012 V. C ONCLUSION The conclusion is that we are going to develop a better system which will help in better interaction between the blood donor application and the blood donor. This application has a wide usage and will encourage donors to donate blood. For Advancement of Blood Donor Application we include Game Mechanics to Motive Blood Donor to donate blood using gamification. Also implementation for cross-platform mobile applications using apache cordova, so that using single souce code we can update application for all platforms at once. R EFERENCES [1] Apace Cordova 2015. Apache Cordova Documentation Overview” [online] Available at: http://cordova.apache.org/docs/en/5.0.0/guide overview index.md.html#Overview [Accessed 5 OCT 2015]. [2] Suyesh Amatya, ”Cross-Platform Mobile Development: An Alternative to Native Mobile Development”, Linnaeus University, OCT 2013. [3] ”PhoneGap — About,” Adobe Systems Inc., 2015. [Online]. Available http://phonegap.com/about/. [Accessed August 2015]. 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[10] WHO Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data, ”Towards 100% voluntary blood donation: a global framework for action” World Health Organization and International Federation of Red Cross, ISBN 9789241599696, 2010. [11] WHO, ”Blood Donor Selection: Guidelines on Assessing Donor Suitability for Blood Donation ” World Health Organization, 2012. [12] Wilkinson Anne R, ”Factors that Motivate and Hinder Blood Donation among First Time Blood Donors” NKP Salve Institute of Medical Sciences and Research Centre, 2013. [13] Kavitha Subramani, ”The Optimization of Blood Donor Information and Management System by Technopedia” Panimalar Engineering College, FEB 2014