Early Symptom Detection and Prevention of Childhood Infectious Diseases using EaSy Detect Disease App

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.