A mobile volunteered geographic information management platform for rural health informatics

Abstract

The causes of the many communicable diseases have some link with the geographical locations. In the developing countries, the patient information are not often collected systemically due to lack of technological support and scarcity of health professionals. As a result, the actual causes of different community diseases are not properly investigated and it delays to take preventive actions, especially in the rural areas. In this work, a service oriented framework has been proposed for collecting the health information of the patients along with their actual geo-locations to generate the health map of the region which may help in adopting mitigation measures. A mobile application has been developed for collecting these information by the health workers or the health volunteers. The application can be tuned to provide suggestive primary treatment of the disease. The collected volunteered disease information can be analyzed with respect to that geospatial information according to guidelines of the health experts and the disease map can produced on-the-fly. The disease map helps to predict the spreading trend of a disease in the context of geospatial attributes. This may facilitate, the public health decision makers to take preventive actions to mitigate the spread of the diseases.