PurpleAid: An mHealth platform to combat health hazards of women

Abstract

Present world is witnessing unprecedented use of mobile technologies in all sectors of everyday life including healthcare and clinical therapies. However, the healthcare of women still lacks sufficient attention from mobile health perspective. Although a number of smartphone applications are available for healthcare of women, all of them focus mainly towards reproductive health like pregnancy and menstruation. In this paper, we present PurpleAid, a complete health support system for women which takes into account possible reproductive and non-reproductive health conditions i.e., conditions unique for women only (e.g., uterine fibroid etc.), affecting men and women differently (e.g., urinary tract infection etc.) and common in both men and women (e.g., heart disease etc.). Our proposed system diagnoses diseases depending on input symptoms given by the users with accurate severity level, provides suggestions for treatment and prevention of the diseases as well as for regular maintenance of fitness. Performance evaluation and usability test results of a prototype implementation show that PurpleAid has emerging potential as a compact user-friendly health support system for women.