Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
OBJECTIVES
The monitory of patients' health has been a
major issue in mobile health care delivery. One
area that requires monitoring is that of medications.
Adverse drug effects are a major cause of death in
the world with tens of thousand deaths occurring
each year because of medication or prescription
errors. Many errors involve the prescription or
administration of the wrong drug or dosage by
care givers to patients due to illegible handwriting,
dosage mistakes, and confusing drug names. With
the use of mobile devices such as personal digital
assistants and smart phones some of these errors
could be eliminated because they allow prescrip-
tion information to be captured and viewed in SMS
rather than handwriting. For instance, common
drugs for HIV/AIDS include; Abacavir, Zidovine
and Luminvudine must be taken with compliance
to the doctor's prescriptions.
Also, at the moment, alert systems in medical
institutions are rare. As a result patients find it hard
to keep track of scheduled meetings with medical
personnel; they also find it difficult to keep track
of prescribed medications. These could have ad-
verse impacts on patients' health, especially for
those with chronic diseases.
In view of the above, the contribution of this
topic chapter is to present the design and deploy-
ment of a Medical Alert System that will improve
HealthCare delivery on a global scale. The system
integrates the functionalities of core e-Health
based systems with an Ozeki SMS server. The
system supports real time transfer of prescription
data to patient through SMS.
An incremental approach to software develop-
ment is used for the development of the system.
This approach allows a system to be decomposed
into a number of components, each of which
are designed and built separately allowing each
component to be delivered to the client when it is
complete. This allows partial utilization of product
and avoids a long development time (Software
Engineering, 2006).
The objective of this chapter is to presents the de-
sign, deployment and evaluation of a mobile-based
medical alert system for managing diseases where
adherence or compliance is paramount for effective
treatment. The system discussed alerts the patients
and medical practitioners about information and
emergencies via text messaging on handheld
devices such as mobile phones and PDAs. It also
allows users to receive scheduled appointment,
medication and updates that will facilitate their
treatment processes. The prototype application is
developed by the incremental software process
model and shall run on a mobile network.
This topic promises to be a major contribution
to the realization of the objectives of Information
and Communication Technology (ICT) policies
and the attainment of the millennium development
goal for many countries. Specifically, a major
component of the ICT policy of Nigeria (Nige-
ria, n.d.), is to deploy Information Technology
to combat serious national health threats such as
HIV/AIDS, etc. The final product is expected to
run on GSM network in the country which pres-
ently supports more than 86 million subscribers
(NCC, n.d.).
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In
section 4 we propose and implement an e-health
solution by providing the architectural design of
MAS. In section 5 we discuss the evaluation of the
system and conclude the topic chapter in Section
6 with some remarks on future work in section 7.
SOLUTION AND RECOMMENDATION
The usage of SMS is mainly to send short text only
messages. SMS is built on GSM (Global System
for Mobile communication) which is highly pa-
tronized in Nigeria. SMS contains a maximum
of 160 characters. The operations supported by
SMS includes: Message Originating (MO) and
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