M-Health : A Mobile Data Collection Prototype for Monitoring and Evaluation of Public Health Service in the Developing World

The rapidly growing use of mobile technologies has increased pressure on the demand for mobile-based data collection solutions to bridge the information gaps in the public health sector. In this paper, a prototype for mobile health data collection (MHDK) is proposed. MHDK is built based on open source data collection frameworks. The proposed prototype offers ways of collecting health data through mobile phones and visualizes the collected data in a web application. The evaluation of the prototype seems to show the feasibility of mobile technologies, particularly open source technologies, in improving the health data collection and reporting systems for the developing world. The use of cellular phones for public health service monitoring and evaluation is therefore one of the most promising developments in the quest to achieve improved public health services