SmokeFreeBrain Project: Building a decoupled clinical trials analytics system based on Drupal, AngularJS and Bootstrap
The SmokeFreeBrain (SFB) project (http://smokefreebrain.eu) is a large European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and it’s funded under grant agreement No 681120. The main objective of the project is to evaluate the interventions in terms of health economics, by studying their cost-effectiveness, and proposing a scalable plan and a clear pathway to embedding the proposed interventions into policy and practice.
We use Drupal as our main application framework, building a clinical trials database, compatible with international health standards, such as the ISO EN13606 standard. Several challenges, such as accessibility, scalability, performance and security are addressed. The overall content type model and database structure, can support data in both raw and structured format. In this session we will explain the general design of the system, and why we used Drupal over existing open source solutions (such as Open Clinica).
The UI is designed using Bootstrap. Special care was given to user experience and usability. In this session we will show how we used expert reviews based on Nielsens’ usability heuristics for user interface design to provide a simpler - yet better in terms of usability - system.
The analytics and reports component of the system is the most critical part of it, because it provides all necessary information to researchers and scientists. We decoupled Drupal and developed an admin panel, based on Bootstrap, AngularJS and Drupal services to exchange information with the SFB clinical trials database. Using popular tools, such as FountainJS, SASS, Karma, Gulp, Bower and NodeJS we developed a continuous delivery system. In this session, we’ll show how we use this system to quickly add new functionality, how we use popular AngularJS modules with data comes from the Drupal database and how we solve in no-time the reported bugs.
- What level of knowledge should attendees have before walking into the session:
Good knowledge of Drupal and services, Bootstrap, AngularJS and basic knowledge of NodeJS, Gulp, Bower, Karma.
- What will your session accomplish and what will attendees walk away having learned:
- How to use Drupal as a framework to design, implement and use it for health professionals and healthcare
- How to use experts to improve usability and user experience of a Drupal front-end
- When to use a decoupled Drupal based solution
- How to develop a decoupled Drupal system based on AngularJS and Bootstrap
- How to combine existing AngularJS and Bootstrap components with Drupal data to offer a rich user experience