DEVELOPMENT OF AN ENHANCED MOBILE APPLICATION FOR COMMUNITY HEALTH WORKERS

ABSTRACT

Access to health care in low resource settings like slums, undeveloped area or devalued community is usually a major challenge and this is due to diverse reasons ranging from poverty, illiteracy and distance to providers of health care resources. Overtime, health care agents known as community health workers (CHWs) were deployed as a remedy to at least alleviate the situation. CHWs serve as the bedrock of community health services which aimed at bridging the gap between communities, health and social service system. However, with the new development of the CHWs’ deployment into the community setting, shortage of CHWs has been a major challenge now and then, this drawback has been for many years and has found a negative expression in the duties of the CHWs. CHWs are continuously collecting household and individual level data that are infrequently used to make timely informed decisions. They will have to transport themselves in mass most times to their target community which is tiring, time consuming and costly. In a bid to address the ugly challenge being faced by the CHWs, a mobile application is developed which enables CHWs to send report of daily, weekly and monthly activities, register patient online, register household online, facilitate effective and consistent communication between health workers and those in the community without having to use manual method but use an android mobile device with internet connectivity. The mobile application was implemented with python programming language and kivy framework while MySQL was used for the database.

Keyword: Community, Health-Care, Health-Workers, Mobile-App