Infants Growth and Development Monitoring: A Prototype Mobile Application – A Case for Botswana Health Care Services

Abstract

The government of Botswana offers free weighing, immunization, growth and development monitoring to all infants from birth until five years. Infant are issued Child Welfare Cards for data collection. This card has to be brought to a health facility whenever the infant is brought in for weighing, immunization or any other health services. The guardian is responsible for the safe keeping of the card, and the data collected. In addition to the usual paper-based system problems, there is no system in place to manage this process and the data collected. This paper presents a prototype mobile application with a database backend to manage such a process. The system has three components; a data collection component, an analysis component, and interactive charts (based on WHO Child Growth Standards 2006) for parents to visualize growth of their kids. We explore different technology stacks suitable to ensure security, confidentiality and reliability, as well as addressing infrastructure constraints especially in rural areas. Our initial results show that this system is feasible and offers a convenient data collection and processing tool for infant growth and development monitoring in Botswana. This system can work in remote areas with poor internet connectivity, is easy to use, and it enhances centralized child weight data collection. The collected data could be used for national decision making. In addition it is aligned to the Botswana National Egovernment strategy 2011-2016 whose mission is to provide universal access to services through the use of strategies and technologies for efficient and effective delivery.

The Design and Development of Parent-Children Vaccination Alert System

“…Most of these children never completes the vaccination because the parents do not show up for appointment. Aside from the standard paper-based system issues, there is no system in place to manage the entire vaccination process [15] making most countries within the Africa region to lag behind in immunization, and thus suffer from a high proportion of vaccine preventable diseases [16]. Notably, reminders and recall for vac cination have been shown to improve health-seeking behaviours and are recommended for use in routine and supplemental measles immunization activities [16].Hence, there is a need to develop a system that will manage the vaccination reminder systems, combine resources and reach parents via short message service particularly in Southern African countries [17].…”