Mobile Technology in Public Health - Designing a Solution to Aid Community Health Workers Involved with Maternal and Child Healthcare in Developing World

Maternal and child health are a big cause for concern in the developing world, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The scale of the problems is huge due to large populations in these parts of the world. This is compounded by a chronic lack of trained healthcare professionals in these regions. Hence, Community Healthcare Workers (CHWs) - the auxiliary healthcare workforce supported by various government and non-government organizations are playing an increasingly important role in the last-mile delivery of healthcare in many of these countries. At the same time, the advent and widespread penetration of mobile technology offers a window of opportunity to try out and deploy innovative new solutions to provide healthcare services at scale in these regions. This thesis hypothesizes that mobile technology can be used to empower the CHWs involved with maternal and child healthcare and make them more effective and efficient in their work. In particular, that the Finnish maternity system's (Neuvola) basic model - combining health education and monitoring - is the right model to adopt for the developing countries and that it can be adapted and applied as a mobile-based application for the CHWs in these regions. Nigeria and India, two of the worst affected countries and representatives of two of the worst affected regions (sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, respectively), were chosen as the focus backdrops for this work. The thesis utilizes theories and frameworks from design science and research - in particular the Information System Research (ISR) framework with the three research cycles (relevance, design and rigor) - and design research tools and methodologies from the field of Human Centered Design (HCD) to answer these research questions and test the hypothesis made. A proof of concept (POC) mobile application providing educational and monitoring capabilities was designed and developed as an outcome of the thesis work. This was in addition to the contextual insights and learning gained during the research process which have been captured in various forms (e.g. context-map, user personas and user-stories etc.). These insights are relevant and useful not only as inputs to the POC application but also in general. Preliminary heuristic evaluation of the POC application was also carried out, the results of which supported the overall concept and design and yielded valuable feedback for further improvement and evaluation