ABSTRACT:
Proliferation and increased performance of mobile computing systems has brought about development of myriad of mobile applications including mobile surveillance, mobile news, mobile games, mobile learning, mobile health etc. Mobile health has many sub-fields one of which is mobile nursing. In this paper, framework for provision of effective mobile nursing system was developed, the framework aid sustainable healthcare provision in developing countries by enabling telenurses to make clinical decisions based on expert advice and carry out some medication administration functions like medication usage monitoring etc. This is with the view to improve health care quality, thereby expanding access to affordable care at reduced health care cost of patients.
Development of this framework involved the establishment of stakeholders required by the system: these included the care centre, telenurse, telepatients and teleconsultants. The detailed attributes and functions of these stakeholders as well as relationship and interaction between the stakeholders were specified. The requirement statement gathered was transformed into use case diagram of the mobile nursing system wherein the design of the framework of the mobile nursing system was designed on. Furthermore, the flow chart of the mobile application which implements the framework designed was detailed.
The mobile nursing system was shown to require low start-up cost as it only requires a central server and mobile phones running Android operating system already possessed by the telenurse, telepatients and teleconsultants. It is believed that the system is cost effective complements to traditional nursing that will reduce the problem of nurse understaffing and reduce rural marginalization in terms of nursing staffs by enabling nurses take ubiquitous clinical decisions about their patients.
Keywords: MOBILE HEALTH, MOBILE NURSING, CLINICAL DECISION.
