The Information and Computer Technology for Indigenous Knowledge Healthcare project is an effort to create a searchable database of complementary healthcare practices accessible on desktop and mobile. As traditional doctors may not be easily reachable in all parts of the world, our database aims to be a digital library to help lay healers and citizens in a more accessible way. The website is accessible at https://health.cs.vt.edu/.

Through meetings with our client, Dr. Agozino, we came up with a list of requirements for the final website. First, it must be easy to administer even for those who don’t have a technical background, to facilitate transferring the website over to another team after we finish the initial implementation. Next, the website must be mobile friendly to increase accessibility around the world. The website should allow for user uploads so that the database of knowledge can grow, with the caveat that user submissions should be moderated as to prevent anything harmful from appearing on the site. Lastly, the site should have external links to a method to donate and references for the posts on the site. Sourcing our posts will give users more confidence in the credibility of the content.

Our design of the website is a wiki-styled site using Wordpress.org. Each post will correspond to a particular remedy and be sorted into one of the categories of body work, energy work, exercise, mindfulness, food & diet, sound & music, and western. Each post will also be tagged with various symptoms it helps with, to allow for further categorizing of posts. Our design also includes a search bar on the home page, and static pages about references, disclaimers, and a privacy policy.

Our website is implemented on a virtual machine hosted at Virginia Tech, allowing for flexibility in customizing what we needed for hosting. Our site has an HTTPS connection, and a MySQL database for managing the posts and pages. The frontend of our site implements Wordpress.org with the MyWiki theme that fulfills many of our client’s requirements right out of the box.

For the future, we plan to implement plugins to cover the other requirements of our project, as well as continue to populate the database based on our research. After we have completed the basic requirements, we have plans for continued moderation and administration of content, which will be covered in our developer’s guide.

Files included are: IndigenousKnowledgeHealthcareFinalReport.pdf - Our final report IndigenousKnowledgeHealthcareFinalReport.docx - Editable version of our final report IndigenousKnowledgeHealthcareFinalPresentation.pdf - Our final presentation IndigenousKnowledgeHealthcareFinalPresentation.pptx - Editable version of our final presentation IndigenousKnowledgeHealthcareVTURCSPoster.png - PNG version of our poster for VTURCS IndigenousKnowledgeHealthcareVTURCSPoster.pptx - PowerPoint version of our poster for VTURCS