MOBILE FACIAL RECOGNITION SYSTEM FOR PATIENT IDENTIFICATION IN MEDICAL EMERGENCIES FOR DEVELOPING ECONOMIES

Abstract

Medical emergencies are part of the common daily lives of people in developing and underdeveloped economies. Frequently, some of these medical emergencies end up tragically for many people in these countries due to many reasons, among which is the delivery of medical treatment when the patient is uncommunicative or unresponsive. The ability of the attending medical personnel to access a patient’s medical history is critical for the quality of the treatment rendered. Unfortunately, today many lives are lost in low income economies during medical emergencies due to lack or inaccessibility of a patient’s medical information. One of the major contributing factors of this paucity in records is attributable to the absence of reliable and costefficient healthcare delivery systems that support patient identification and verification. Due to the current ubiquity of mobile devices with their concomitant digital cameras, this paper explores the feasibility and practicability of using mobile platform and facial recognition technology as a means to deploying a cost-efficient system for reliable patient identification and verification.