JMIR Publications

Background:

Typhoid fever remains a major health problem in developing countries: According to the World Health Organisation, there are 21 million cases of Typhoid Fever worldwide and 222,000 typhoid-related deaths occurring annually. Relapsed typhoid fever patient needs to be equipped with resources and services to always monitor their symptoms.

Objective:

Our primary objective is to propose a mobile-based monitoring methodology, which uses vital signs monitoring apparatus, which is configured to recognise the characteristics of typhoid recurrence. Key to our design is the implementation of sensors for body temperature monitoring and physiological testing through galvanic skin response (GSR), electrocardiographic testing (ECG) and electromyography (EMG).

Methods:

Our observation is based upon Electrocardiogram (ECG) to capture heart rate signals by the electrodes attached to the participant’s body. The participants were healthy middle-aged male and female. Following-up the electromyography (EMG) evaluates the health condition of the participant’s muscles and the nerve cells that controls them (motor neurons) through pre-gelled electrodes attached to the participant and measurement taken every 30 seconds. If the test was to be on an aftercare typhoid patient the aim would be to evaluate muscle function post-typhoid and to check for any possibility of the patient going into a relapse. The galvanic skill response (GSR) modulates the level of sweat secretion from sweat glands.

Results:

Our experiments proved that all four biometric parameters work accurately for typical monitoring of physiological signals in real time.

Conclusions:

This research work proves that our pervasive typhoid fever outpatient self-monitoring sensor is more effective than Widal test and culture approaches because these techniques are expensive and test facilities are not readily available or are limited in areas where it is most needed.

ClinicalTrial: