E-Health : A smartphone-based e-health application for enhancing rural healthcare with the integration of medical sensor devices

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to develop a smartphone or tablet based eHealth applica-tion to assist health workers in remote regions of different parts of the world with record-ing medical information and with the provision of basic health services to the patients.Health applications are becoming more popular day by day, and the use of technologyalong with these applications helps to improve the healthcare system. In this project,”mTeleHealth-UiA”, a smartphone-based application, was developed to address this chal-lenge. The application was implemented for the Android platform in the Android studiodevelopment environment, using XML and Java programming language. The app wasdesigned to meet the identified requirements. It allows to create a health worker profile,under which new patient information can be collected and stored, the patients’ vital signscan be measured with medical sensor devices, a score based on the vital parameters canbe calculated to give recommendations for further follow-up, and the medical history canbe checked to analyze the symptoms and support the diagnosis. Due to time limitations,we could not test this application in a real world scenario with real health workers andpatients. Instead, after the implementation of the project, we tested the application withsome test participants, using a questionnaire to obtain feedback based on their experience.The test result was analyzed, and most of the participants found it to be user-friendlyand useful. Overall, they were satisfied with the process of information collection andsuggestions provided to the patient. Feedback and proposals from the participants areessential and will be adopted in future work, and some are also proposed as part of furtherdevelopment in the near future.i