Child mortality is one of the most pressing health concerns almost 10
million children die worldwide each year before reaching their fifth
birthday, mostly in low-income countries. To aid overburdened and
undertrained health workers the World Health Organization (WHO) and
United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) have developed clinical
guidelines, such as the Integrated Management of Childhood Illness
(IMCI) to help with the classification and treatment of common
childhood illness. To help with deployment, we have developed an
electronic version (e-IMCI) that runs on a PDA. From July to September
2007, we ran a pilot of e-IMCI in southern Tanzania. The system guides
health workers step-by-step through the treatment algorithms and
automatically calculates drug doses. Our results suggest that
electronic implementations of protocols such as IMCI can reduce
training time and improve adherence to the protocol. They also
highlight several important challenges including varying levels of
education, language and expertise, which could be most adequately
addressed by implementing novel intelligent user interfaces and
systems.
Brian DeRenzi, Krzysztof Z. Gajos, Tapan S. Parikh, Neal Lesh, Marc Mitchell, and Baetano Borriello. Opportunities for Intelligent Interfaces Aiding Healthcare in Low-Income Countries. In Workshop on Intelligent User Interfaces for Developing Regions (at IUI'08), 2008.
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