Frugal development and deployment of an innovative mobile health platform for COVID-19 in Sri Lanka: the case of SelfShield app

IF 1.4 Q3 HEALTH CARE SCIENCES & SERVICES

BMJ Innovations Pub Date : 2021-09-28 DOI:10.1136/bmjinnov-2021-000836

P. Siribaddana, Chathura Wirasinghe, Sahan Perera, Dilshan Ganepola, V. Dissanayake

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Abstract

© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2021. No commercial reuse. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ. INTRODUCTION During the early phases of the COVID19 pandemic, emerging technologies focused largely on strengthening the health system, supporting law enforcement authorities, and enabling researchers to model COVID19 outbreaks and resource requirements. When the health systems are burdened by the influx of patients with COVID19, it is neither practical nor rational to treat all patients with COVID19 in the hospital as many will either be asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic. Thus, home monitoring of patients has been practised in many countries. 3 Respiratory involvement was the first documented site of complications and still continues to be responsible for majority of the deaths. Therefore, in order to provide effective home care for patients with COVID19, we recognised the need for a frugal technology tool to monitor patients remotely including monitoring the breathing performance. Guided by the Commonwealth Centre for Digital Health (CWCDH), a voluntary group of medical doctors, health informaticians and software developers from Sri Lanka embarked on a mission to fulfil this need by developing a smart phonebased selfhealth checking tool. Named the SelfShield project, the system comprised a smart phone app, a dashboard for medical teams and machine learning algorithms capable of analysing breathing and voice signals. This report reflects on our early experience with the SelfShield system and we were guided by the following key objectives: 1. Identifying already validated bedside clinical tests that may be cost effectively transformed into a mobile platform. 2. Designing and developing a mobile app to capture subjective and objective COVID19related data in a userfriendly manner and a dashboard that can help medical professionals assist consenting users. 3. Developing machine learning algorithms capable of analysing sound signals to facilitate decision making related to COVID19. 4. Deploying the system as a COVID19 response tool with a focus on citizen empowerment.

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在斯里兰卡低成本开发和部署新型COVID-19移动医疗平台:以SelfShield应用程序为例

©作者(或其雇主)2021。禁止商业重用。请参阅权利和权限。英国医学杂志出版。在covid - 19大流行的早期阶段，新兴技术主要侧重于加强卫生系统，支持执法当局，并使研究人员能够模拟covid - 19疫情和资源需求。当卫生系统因covid - 19患者的涌入而负担沉重时，在医院治疗所有covid - 19患者既不现实也不合理，因为许多患者要么无症状，要么症状轻微。因此，许多国家已经实行了对患者的家庭监测。3呼吸受累是第一个有记录的并发症部位，并且仍然是大多数死亡的原因。因此，为了为covid - 19患者提供有效的家庭护理，我们认识到需要一种节俭的技术工具来远程监测患者，包括监测呼吸表现。在英联邦数字健康中心(CWCDH)的指导下，一个由斯里兰卡的医生、健康信息学家和软件开发人员组成的自愿小组开始了一项任务，通过开发一种基于智能手机的自我健康检查工具来满足这一需求。这个名为SelfShield的系统由一个智能手机应用程序、一个医疗团队的仪表板和能够分析呼吸和语音信号的机器学习算法组成。本报告反映了我们早期使用SelfShield系统的经验，我们遵循以下主要目标:确定已经被验证的床边临床测试，这些测试可以经济有效地转化为移动平台。2. 设计和开发一款移动应用程序，以用户友好的方式捕获与covid - 19相关的主观和客观数据，并设计一个仪表板，帮助医疗专业人员协助同意的用户。3.开发能够分析声音信号的机器学习算法，以促进与covid - 19相关的决策。4. 部署该系统作为covid - 19应对工具，重点是公民赋权。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

BMJ Innovations Medicine-Medicine (all)

CiteScore

4.20

自引率

0.00%

发文量

期刊介绍： Healthcare is undergoing a revolution and novel medical technologies are being developed to treat patients in better and faster ways. Mobile revolution has put a handheld computer in pockets of billions and we are ushering in an era of mHealth. In developed and developing world alike healthcare costs are a concern and frugal innovations are being promoted for bringing down the costs of healthcare. BMJ Innovations aims to promote innovative research which creates new, cost-effective medical devices, technologies, processes and systems that improve patient care, with particular focus on the needs of patients, physicians, and the health care industry as a whole and act as a platform to catalyse and seed more innovations. Submissions to BMJ Innovations will be considered from all clinical areas of medicine along with business and process innovations that make healthcare accessible and affordable. Submissions from groups of investigators engaged in international collaborations are especially encouraged. The broad areas of innovations that this journal aims to chronicle include but are not limited to: Medical devices, mHealth and wearable health technologies, Assistive technologies, Diagnostics, Health IT, systems and process innovation.