Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Public Health and Surveillance
Date Submitted: May 31, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Jun 1, 2018 - Jul 17, 2018
Date Accepted: Jul 17, 2018
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Bringing Real-Time Geospatial Precision to HIV Surveillance Through Smartphones: Feasibility Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Precise measurements of HIV incidences at community level can help mount a more effective public health response, but the most reliable methods currently require labor-intensive population surveys. Novel mobile phone technologies are being tested for adherence to medical appointments and antiretroviral therapy, but using them to track HIV test results with automatically generated geospatial coordinates has not been widely tested.
Objective:
We customized a portable reader for interpreting the results of HIV lateral flow tests and developed a mobile phone app to track HIV test results in urban and rural locations in Rwanda. The objective was to assess the feasibility of this technology to collect front line HIV test results in real time and with geospatial context to help measure HIV incidences and improve epidemiological surveillance.
Methods:
Twenty health care workers used the technology to track the test results of 2190 patients across 3 hospital sites (2 urban sites in Kigali and a rural site in the Western Province of Rwanda). Mobile phones for less than US $70 each were used. The mobile phone app to record HIV test results could take place without internet connectivity with uploading of results to the cloud taking place later with internet.
Results:
A total of 91.51% (2004/2190) of HIV test results could be tracked in real time on an online dashboard with geographical resolution down to street level. Out of the 20 health care workers, 14 (70%) would recommend the lateral flow reader, and 100% would recommend the mobile phone app.
Conclusions:
Smartphones have the potential to simplify the input of HIV test results with geospatial context and in real time to improve public health surveillance of HIV.
Citation

Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.