Mobile Technology Support for the Assessment and Management of COVID-19 Outbreak: Benefits and Challenges

Mobile Technology Support for the Assessment and Management of COVID-19 Outbreak: Benefits and Challenges

Chinazunwa Uwaoma, Clement C. Aladi
Copyright: © 2021 |Pages: 12
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-6067-8.ch002
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Abstract

The early months in 2020 saw a rapid increase in the adoption of mHealth and telehealth across the globe. The obvious reason being the sudden outbreak of coronavirus infectious disease (COVID-19), which sent the entire world scrambling for solutions to contain and mitigate the spread. Ordinarily, telehealth and mHealth are considered optional in most traditional healthcare systems even in developed countries, but today, these technologies have become the most sought-after tools required to augment the overwhelmed healthcare systems orchestrated by COVID-19. Mobile technology in particular has continued to play important roles in the monitoring, surveillance, and the assessment of the outbreak in so many ways. This chapter offers a window into different ways mHealth and telemedicine are used to provide healthcare services and disease management, as well as the challenges in the implementation of these technologies as the world braces for the devastating effects of COVID-19.
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Background

In the past decade, quite a number of mobile phone applications have been developed to monitor and manage certain health conditions. Whereas some are based on cloud computing platforms (Fernandes et al., 2011), some function as standalone systems (Uwaoma & Mansingh, 2018). Given that smartphones are globally used for personal convenience, running healthcare applications on them does not only guarantee ease of use but also facilitate communication between patients and caregivers. Areas in which mHealth systems have been extensively deployed includes monitoring of chronic health conditions (Larson et al., 2017) and early detection of risk factors of such ailments (Uwaoma & Mansingh, 2019).

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