Development of a unique Ukrainian educational platform for amputees and healthcare professionals

Due to the russian war in Ukraine, the number of amputees is increasing. The issue of functional and high-quality prosthetics is becoming quite relevant. People often don't know what to do or how to support their loved ones.

The educational platform Baza Znan: Protez Hub has been created to help both people with limb loss and healthcare professionals get all the necessary information about rehabilitation and prosthetics.

Our team worked on the platform development for about two months. Today we are thrilled to share our experience and the technical decisions made during development.

About the project

The Protez Hub is the first information resource in Ukraine about the rehabilitation process for people with limb loss. The platform hosts free lectures on physical rehabilitation, occupational therapy, prosthetics, and a multidisciplinary approach to working with patients. Also, users can print out and use additional materials after each lecture.

The Prothez Hub team has been developing the limb prosthetics field in Ukraine since 2015. They provide practical exchanges, seminars, and webinars in cooperation with foreign and Ukrainian specialists, organizations, and the government.

"Creating the Baza Znan: Protez Hub platform was a logical and timely decision, and I am truly proud that we have implemented it," says the Founder and President of Prothez Hub, Antonina Kumka.

Many professionals participated in the development. Our Rolique team managed the platform's development; Ruslan Batytskyi and Anna Borysova, the video production crew, filmed and edited the lectures; the Tabasco Agency designers created a user-friendly platform appearance. All of it came to fruition with the support of the ‘Saving Lives’ initiative by Metinvest.

The resource will be available in two languages: Ukrainian and English.

Our part

Our team worked on developing two websites: a main platform and a knowledge base with video lectures, which has a Learning Management System format. Our specialists have been performing analysis and making all necessary technical decisions to build these platforms from scratch.

The project was implemented by a team of two back-end developers, two front-end developers, a designer, and a project coordinator.

Tech solutions

The main challenge for our team was hard deadlines. This project wasn`t technically challenging but required implementation time, which became crucial in decision-making.

We chose Drupal 10, the latest version of the open-source digital experience platform, to implement this project. It has several essential advantages. Firstly, it allowed us to reduce development time significantly. We immediately got a standard set of functionality: blog pages, registration pages, password generation, and content management. Multilingualism can also be implemented with Drupal.

Secondly, even though there are two separate websites, they share a common database and code. Protez Hub is the main domain, and Baza Znan was made as a subdomain. Drupal allowed us to implement this without redundant code.

Thirdly, it was important for the customer to administer the website content independently. A ready-made solution for Drupal allowed us to implement all necessary functions more conveniently, quickly, and efficiently.

Finally, since we were limited in time, the advantage of Drupal 10 was the possibility of constructing the website and filling it with blocks in the required order. We created blocks and programmed them in the admin panel and the Drupal layout. It allowed us to cope with such an enormous task in a short time.

Data security

Another important request from the customer was data security, namely that videos could only be viewed on the Baza Znan website. We needed to protect the video from being downloaded and reused.

Our first idea was to use free solutions from Vimeo or YouTube. However, a detailed analysis revealed that free versions of these services allow only to upload videos publicly, which would not protect content from downloading or being reused.

The second option was to publish unlisted videos to YouTube, which won't appear in general lists and will only be available via a direct link. But that also didn't give us the degree of protection we needed. Private videos, in turn, require an email invitation for each specific video, which would take too much time and manual work for our client.

We sought a solution and found a ready-made Bunny.net content delivery platform. It is a data store that allows hashing of videos using a protocol developed by Google. The service encodes video using specific keys. Users who load a video and try to run without keys will only see a black screen. In addition, the platform allows configuring blocking access to a direct link to a file.

Our team adjusted the service to the customer's needs. All the necessary settings will be automatically applied when they upload a video. The only vulnerability left is the screen recording. Still, the platform allows inserting watermarks on videos to protect copyrights.

Certificate generation

Since the Baza Znan is also an educational platform for healthcare professionals, it was necessary to implement certificate generation. After watching the video, specialists must take a test to confirm their knowledge to receive a certificate of completion. In this case, we chose not to use ready-made solutions but to describe the logic independently.

Of course, some ready-made solutions allow the implementation of the desired functionality. However, they contain a lot of unnecessary functionality, which would have slowed down the website. For example, there are two popular integrations with services for Drupal, but with a significant drawback: the Front-end is written in one case on React and Angular in another. Adaptation to the existing design would have taken too long.

Therefore, we decided to create a new one that fully meets the project's needs.

Conclusions

Overcoming the consequences of injuries is quite acute in Ukraine. Because of the war, many people faced the problems of amputations and prosthetics, but there was no single resource to find the necessary information. We are happy that our team worked on implementing such a socially significant and valuable project.

Since the launch, more than 400 people have registered on the website.

"This is a personal project for me because my dad is currently at war. I often think what if something like this happens to him? It's good that there is a platform where you can find specialists and manufacturers that work with amputees. That's why our team took up this project so enthusiastically. We wanted people to be able to use it as soon as possible. Many people believe that high-quality prosthetics are possible only abroad. Nobody looks at Ukrainian manufacturers because they think they use outdated technologies. But it's not true. At this point, our views coincide with the customer's because we wanted to prove that Ukrainian prosthetics are at a high level. Ukrainian specialists use the latest technologies; their expertise is as strong as foreign ones.", says Liubov Petrenko, Project Coordinator.

Our company is going to transfer 100% of the earnings of this project to charity needs. 20% has already been transferred to support the Armed Forces of Ukraine.