Case studies

Mental Health Data Collection

A Welsh county council wanted to build a product that would process many granular datasets involving numerous areas of the county in order to produce a ‘Loneliness Index’: a prediction of the likelihood that people living in those areas may suffer as a result of loneliness or isolation.

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Challenge

The largest technical challenge was the sheer amount of data (e.g., boundary data for visualisation and the datasets needed for the algorithm) to be ingested and processed. The data could also be at different levels of granularity, and therefore had to be aggregated up or broken down as appropriate.​

Solution

Since no open-source solution presently exists that allows for the combination of the map and datasets, execution of the algorithm and visualisation of the data in a unified package, a bespoke solution is developed in-house to accomplish our expected goals.​

The platform’s map component is created using React Leaflet – an open-source mapping library that utilises publicly available boundary data to render maps inside of a React application.​

​The platform then ingests geographical boundary information and utilises the regions of a county to facilitate the map visualisation.​

This information is then combined with the datasets.​

The datasets – some public, others proprietary – are ingested by MongoDB in their entirety. The codebase that retrieves/aggregates the data is then refactored across numerous iterations, greatly improving performance across the board.​

​The information can then be displayed via the web app, including maps, geographic data, determinants, risk factors and user personas.​

Technology Stack

  • React​
  • MongoDB​
  • GIS / Mapping​

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