Measurement of height throught software developed for mobile devices for the growth control in children

Abstract

The control of height in children is important to monitor their healthy development early in life. In this work we analyzed the implementation of an Android-based application for the measurement of height in children between 2 and 7 years old. The objective of this manuscript is to evaluate the growth curves of children, and supply an automated diagnostics tool to the health professional to compare growth curves with standards of the World Health Organization (WHO). To obtain the height of children in a mobile device, we used the triangulation method in which the measurements are obtained through the accelerometer and the gyroscope embedded in the mobile device (Samsung Galaxy Tab 3). As control experiment, we measured the height of 17 children using the manual method of the book and measuring tape. Then, we measure the same subjects with our mobile application. The results showed that height measurements using our mobile device varied slightly among them (coefficient of variance = 0.13) when compared to measurements obtained with the manual method (coefficient of variance = 0.41). Additionally, with the use of our Android-based application we reduced the time to measure the height of a child from 12.5 s to 3.20 s, which allows the health professional to make periodic measures of a large number of children and, most importantly, accurately detect any anomalies in their growth rates.