Maintenance Notice

Due to necessary scheduled maintenance, the JMIR Publications website will be unavailable from Wednesday, July 01, 2020 at 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM EST. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause you.

Who will be affected?

Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Pediatrics and Parenting

Date Submitted: Jan 29, 2021
Date Accepted: May 12, 2021

The final, peer-reviewed published version of this preprint can be found here:

A Mobile App for Self-Triage for Pediatric Emergency Patients in Japan: 4 Year Descriptive Epidemiological Study

Katayama Y, Kiyohara K, Hirose T, Matsuyama T, Ishida K, Nakao S, Tachino J, Ojima M, Noda T, Kiguchi T, Hayashida S, Kitamura T, Mizobata Y, Shimazu T

A Mobile App for Self-Triage for Pediatric Emergency Patients in Japan: 4 Year Descriptive Epidemiological Study

JMIR Pediatr Parent 2021;4(2):e27581

DOI: 10.2196/27581

PMID: 34255709

PMCID: 8280828

Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.

Profile of self-triage with a cellphone app for pediatric emergency patients: A population-based study in Japan

  • Yusuke Katayama; 
  • Kosuke Kiyohara; 
  • Tomoya Hirose; 
  • Tasuku Matsuyama; 
  • Kenichiro Ishida; 
  • Shunichiro Nakao; 
  • Jotaro Tachino; 
  • Masahiro Ojima; 
  • Tomohiro Noda; 
  • Takeyuki Kiguchi; 
  • Sumito Hayashida; 
  • Tetsuhisa Kitamura; 
  • Yasumitsu Mizobata; 
  • Takeshi Shimazu

ABSTRACT

Background:

When children suffer sudden illness or injury, many parents wonder whether they should go to the hospital immediately or call an ambulance. In 2015, we developed a mobile app that allows parents or guardians to determine the urgency of their child’s condition or call an ambulance, and which indicates available hospitals and clinics when their child is suddenly sick or injured by simply selecting the child’s chief complaints and symptoms. However, the effectiveness of medical apps used by the general public has not been well evaluated.

Objective:

The purpose of this study was to reveal a profile of the use of this mobile app based on data usage in the app.

Methods:

This study was a descriptive epidemiological study with a 4-year study period running from January 2016 to December 2019. We included cases in which the app was used either by the children themselves or by their parents and other guardians. The cases in which the app was downloaded but never actually used were excluded from this study. Continuous variables are presented as medians and interquartile range (IQR), and categorical variables are presented as actual number and percentages.

Results:

The app was used during the study period for 59,375 children whose median age was 1 year (IQR: 0-3 years). The app was used for 33,874 (57.1%) infants, 16,228 (27.3%) toddlers, 8,102 (13.6%) elementary school students, 1117 (1.9%) junior high school students, and 54 (0.1%) were unknown. Among them, 31,519 (53.1%) were male, 27,329 (46.0%) were female, and sex was unknown for 527 (0.9%). “Sickness” was chosen for 49,101 (78.5%) patients, and “Injury, poisoning, foreign substances and others” was chosen for 13,441 (21.5%). For “Sickness”, “fever” was most commonly selected (22,773, 36.4%), followed by “cough” (4054, 6.5%) and “nausea/vomiting” (3528, 5.6%), whereas for “Injury, poisoning, foreign substances and others”, “head and neck injury” was most commonly selected (3887, 6.2%), followed “face and extremities injury” (1493, 2.4%) and “injury and foreign substances in eyes” (1255, 2.0%).

Conclusions:

This study revealed the profile of use of a self-triage app for pediatric emergency patients in Japan.


 Citation

Please cite as:

Katayama Y, Kiyohara K, Hirose T, Matsuyama T, Ishida K, Nakao S, Tachino J, Ojima M, Noda T, Kiguchi T, Hayashida S, Kitamura T, Mizobata Y, Shimazu T

A Mobile App for Self-Triage for Pediatric Emergency Patients in Japan: 4 Year Descriptive Epidemiological Study

JMIR Pediatr Parent 2021;4(2):e27581

DOI: 10.2196/27581

PMID: 34255709

PMCID: 8280828

Download PDF


Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.

© 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.