Mobile health monitoring system for community health workers

Abstract

The leading global cause of high mortality has been identified to be chronic non-communicable diseases such as stroke, cancer, chronic respiratory conditions, heart disease, diabetes etc. These diseases affect communities both from the rural and urban areas. Deaths as a result of these diseases are relatively higher in rural communities as most of them have limited access to health care services. The limited access to health care services by rural communities is due to the difficulty experienced by governments in bringing those services to rural communities. Contributing factors to the difficulty is the inaccessibility of those communities and shortage of resources such as health professionals. The authors in this paper share the sentiment that community health workers can play a major role in assisting governments to deliver health services to rural communities regardless of their location. This paper therefore presents an application that supports health workers in diagnosing and monitoring non-communicable diseases in rural communities.