Public Health Planning and Citizen Engagement: Exploring the Need and the Sustainability of an Open Source Platform for Dengue Prevention in Sri Lanka

Abstract

The rise of Information Communication Technology (ICT) has offered the world a new and efficient mechanism to increase active citizen engagement. Growth in open source technology has widened the space for engaging a vast number of citizens limitless of geographical and hierarchical boundaries via crowdsourcing real-time data. Even though there is a boom in using ICTs in connecting and sharing knowledge and information among different stakeholders, still, there is a considerable gap in using open source technology in combating public health issues around the world. As a country with a high internet usage rate, Sri Lanka still shows underutilization of such technologies in monitoring and preventing non-communicable diseases. Dengue is a serious health threat in Sri Lanka which shows the need for active surveillance in prevention. The main objective of the paper is to seek the potential possibility of using the Internet of Things (IoT) in preventing dengue outbreak in Sri Lanka. Also, it aims to identify the opportunities for using a mobile application and even tries to address the usability issues that could arise when introducing and retaining a mobile application. By doing that, this paper will contribute to filling the gap in research on functionality and usability issues and also introduces a user-friendly open source application to prevent dengue outbreak in Sri Lanka. The proposed development of the mobile platform for dengue prevention has considered the economic and social understanding of people as rational thinkers and collective actors and also has used the user-friendly guidelines of mobile application development.