REMADDICT : A solution to aid Adolescents challenged with Substance Abuse Disorder in Sri Lanka

Abstract

"The subject of ‘war on drugs’ has only worsened over time in the world, even so that the spread of drugs is rapidly increasing amongst the youth. It’s an overlooked issue even in Sri Lanka and is in the need of imminent attention as the country has been witnessing an alarming rise in numbers amongst adolescents in the recent past. Additionally, Individuals struggling with substance use disorder are most often stigmatised and criminalised in Sri Lanka, with little to no proper support in most parts of the island. The main aim of this implementation is to analyse and identify the factors contributing to the increase of drug addiction, and to analyse, design, develop, and evaluate a mean that would contribute as a withdrawal symptom predictor and a maintenance application to assist drawing patients closer to medical professionals in the field. The system will contain two user portals: user and doctor, with features such as a knowledge hub, storing customer data, conduct online therapy goal trackers, search nearby therapists, etc. To support this research, a thorough background study was conducted with the help of available resources and interviewing domain experts. Additionally, a survey was conducted and distributed to two populations; the diseased, and their loved ones to get a perspective from both sides of the affected by this condition. The data gathered with the survey laid the foundation in which the requirements were built upon. After finalising the requirements, the user interface was developed on adobe XD, facilitated by icons from the figma community, as the first step to implementation. Eventually, the mobile application prototype was built on android studio with the incorporation of technologies such as Java, firebase, Google maps APIs, machine learning recommendation model, etc. During the process of implementation many new skills and knowledge on tools were enhanced and sharpened along the way. To round off, this research was initiated with the purpose of bringing forth an implementation to an area that has been technically overlooked. The issue REMADDICT will be addressing has not only been overlooked from a technical perspective but disregarded as a whole. Therefore, with the world rapidly evolving in technology, the e-health sector of Sri Lanka too needs major contribution in terms of catering to the uncontrollable menace of the substance abuse disorder amongst the younger population. Having no application built in this domain, REMADDICT aims to cater as a milestone application that serves adolescents burdened with the condition, with a big scope of being enhanced even further in the future.

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