Using mobile phones to monitor HIV/AIDS patients on Anti Retroviral Therapy (ART) in Uganda

Abstract

Patient monitoring is very important during Anti-Retroviral Therapy (ART) administration to ensure that the patient is safe especially in regards to toxicities of ARV drugs. ART service providers need to continuously monitor treatment outcomes. Treatment out comes can either be treatment success or treatment failure. Treatment success involves improvement of the patient's condition during treatment manifested by a decrease in the viral load, increase in CD4 count and clinically no opportunistic infections. Treatment failure can either be: Virological failure, Immunological failure and Clinical failure. Both qualitative and quantitative interviews were held with patients and ART service providers to access the feasibility of using mobile phones to monitor patients on ART in Uganda. This paper, presents a mobile based system design to monitor both treatment success and treatment failure.