Accepted for/Published in: Interactive Journal of Medical Research
Date Submitted: Oct 31, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Nov 2, 2018 - Nov 21, 2018
Date Accepted: Feb 26, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
EasyDetectDisease: An Android App for Early Symptom Detection and Prevention of Childhood Infectious Diseases
Background:
Infectious diseases often lead to death among children under 5 years in many underdeveloped and developing countries. One of the main reasons behind this is an unawareness of disease symptoms among mothers and child caregivers. To overcome this, we propose the EasyDetectDisease mobile health app to educate mothers about the early symptoms of pediatric diseases and to provide them with practical advice for preventing the spread of such diseases in children under 5 years. The EasyDetectDisease app includes detailed knowledge of infectious diseases, including the corresponding symptoms, causes, incubation period, preventive measures, nutritional guidelines such as breastfeeding, video tutorials of child patients, and video guidelines by pediatric health experts to promote child health. It also provides information on the diagnosis of the infectious diseases based on symptoms.
Objective:
The objective of this study was to evaluate the usability (eg, ease of use, easy detection of disease, functionality, and navigation of interfaces) of the EasyDetectDisease app among mothers of children under 5 years of age.
Methods:
Two health sessions, held in Pakistan, were used to evaluate the usability of EasyDetectDisease by 30 mothers of children under 5 years. The app was evaluated based on various quantitative and qualitative measures.
Results:
The participating mothers confirmed that they were able to diagnose diseases accurately and that after following the instructions provided, their children recovered rapidly without any nutritional deficiency. All participating mothers showed an interest in using the EasyDetectDisease app if made available by governmental public health agencies, and they suggested its inclusion in all mobile phones as a built-in health app in the future.
Conclusions:
EasyDetectDisease was modified into a user-friendly app based on feedback collected during the usability sessions. All participants found it acceptable and easy to use, especially illiterate mothers. The EasyDetectDisease app proved to be a useful tool for child health care at home and for the treatment of infectious diseases and is expected to reduce the mortality rate of children under 5 years of age.
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.