Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Remote Health Care and
Home Monitoring
of the mobile interface is very important when
designing an mHealth solution. Since, there are
diverse population and language groups in de-
veloping countries, it is important to customize
these interfaces in more local languages and also
support more intuitive and graphical interfaces
that can be perceived in the same way across
different groups.
It is important to involve all stakeholders,
from patients to health care providers to IT and
cellular firms to see the benefits of transitioning
to the mHealth paradigm. It is vital for govern-
ments in these countries to provide the leadership
and political will to make the change a success.
Societies need to elevate their lifestyle expecta-
tions and patients need to be more responsible
for their health monitoring. At the same time,
health care organizations need to be convinced
that upgrading their IT infrastructure to deal with
mHealth solutions can go a long way in enhancing
the management of chronic diseases. It can help
prevent illnesses and communicable diseases in
the future.
There are some shining examples of using
wireless technologies in health care in the devel-
oped world for disease management. Diseases
like AIDS, diabetes, and influenza play a major
part in the way pharmaceutical and health care
providers operate on a daily basis. This needs to
be realized for the developing world too. Through
some of the case studies in this chapter, we have
shown that significant progress has been made
in certain countries like Uganda to manage the
monitoring of these diseases.
As already pointed out, significant resources
need to be expended on realizing the technical in-
frastructure for mHealth. Collaborating with other
governments that have significant expertise in the
area of mHealth could prove to be very useful in
the long run. Since mHealth is still in its infancy, a
lot can be learned from the experiences by people
from different geographical regions and population
groups. Significant effort also has to be expended
on training both subscribers of these services and
the actual professionals providing health care to
Solutions for remote health care and home moni-
toring find particular application for the elderly,
where relatives need to keep tabs on their health
and constantly monitor if they are following their
medical regime. People tend to forget things when
they age or in a certain medical condition, so it
is necessary that any mHealth system for home
monitoring require as little user input as pos-
sible and carry out reporting as unobtrusively as
possible. In addition to this, technology is also
intended to strengthen the long-term involvement
of patients in the health care reporting process.
Making technologies intuitive, enjoyable, and edu-
cational to use for communicating with concerned
families and health care teams is a challenge as
well. By introducing more novel communication
approaches like e-mail, video conferencing, SMS
and MMS messages, and other techniques to
communicate (apart from periodic mail delivery
and phone calls), patients can get more involved
in reporting their health care to family and be
monitored as well. Touch screens and more in-
tuitive services can also be handed out to people
with little IT experience to get involved in health
monitoring. At the minimum, patients and their
health care providers need to be educated on how
to use these technologies.
CONCLUSION
Though mHealth applications promise great
potential in improving health care in developing
countries, there remain many challenges in their
effective deployment and usage. Process change
challenges are much more difficult to overcome
than technical challenges. Upgrading existing
health care IT infrastructure in developing coun-
tries and adding new infrastructure is a very dif-
ficult task when health budgets are limited. There
is also a resistance to new technologies imported
from the developed world. Technically, usability
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