A comprehensive easy-to-use techno-human solution for the resource-constrained nations in the fight against communicable disease like the coronavirus pandemic

Abstract

Following the advent of the novel Coronavirus, the governments and authorities introduced various mobile applications in the fight against COVID-19. However, these are either restricted by the developer country or not comprised of certain key features, due to which, a vast population from the low- or middle-income country, remains underprivileged from associated benefits. The purpose of this study is to explore and demonstrate how to build a comprehensive and easy-to-use application for mobile health service delivery especially fabricated to fight communicable diseases like COVID-19. Mostly open-source technologies are used to build a distributed scalable client-server application. Then the application is evaluated with the stress-test and usability-test. Besides COVID-19 advisories and guidelines, the study demonstrates complete conceptualization and development of an IoT-based mobile application. It comprises three key features that bring comprehensiveness. One is the ‘contact logger & tracer’ that enables users to maintain a list of contacts who get notified if any of them reported COVID-19 positive in the last 14 days. Two is the ‘self-assessment' which helps users to predict the chances of COVID-19 infection using a scientific rationale. Three is the ‘infection tracker’ that guides users to identify infected hotspots to plan the route accordingly. The usability-test affirmed that the application is easy-to-use. Further, this study demonstrates how to construct such an easy-to-use application mostly with open-source resources. It can help the needy authorities or groups from resource-constrained countries to adopt and develop such applications quickly. Further research on the post-implementation effect will add value to this study.