Abstract:
Infectious diseases often lead to mortality of children under-five years in most
of the under-developed and developing countries of world. One of the main
reasons behind this is the unawareness about symptoms and diagnosis of
these diseases among mothers and child caregivers. To overcome these issues,
we propose an mHealth App, i.e., EaSyDetectDisease, which is developed
using the Android platform to educate mothers about early symptoms of
pediatric diseases and to provide them with practical advice for preventing
the spread of such diseases in children under-five. The EaSyDetectDisease
app encompasses the detailed knowledge of infectious diseases including the
corresponding symptoms, causes, incubation period, preventive measures,
nutritional guidelines, like breast feeding, video tutorials of child patients
and video guidelines by the child experts to promote children health. It also
provides the facility of diagnosis of the infectious diseases based on symptoms.
A usability study has been conducted in two health sessions in Pakistan to
evaluate the use of EaSyDetectDisease app among 30 mothers of children
under-five based on easy detection of disease, functionality of the app and
navigation of the interfaces. The app has been evaluated based on various
quantitative and qualitative measures. The participating mothers confirmed
that they were able to diagnose the diseases accurately and after following the
instructions, their kids recovered rapidly without any nutritional deficiency.
All the participating mothers showed interest to use the EaSyDetectDisease
app, if made available at the governmental public health agencies and they
suggested its inclusion in all smart phones as an inbuilt health app in future
as well. The EaSyDetectDisease app proved to be a useful tool for children
health care at home, the treatment of infectious diseases and is expected to
reduce the under-five mortality rate.
