Monitoring and Assisting Maternity-Infant Care in Rural Areas (MAMICare)

Monitoring and Assisting Maternity-Infant Care in Rural Areas (MAMICare)

Juan C. Lavariega (Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico), Gustavo A. Córdova (Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico), Lorena G. Gómez (Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico) and Alfonso Avila (Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico)
Copyright: © 2016 |Pages: 13
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-8756-1.ch017

Abstract

Presented is the project called MAMICare, which is motivated by the alarming number of maternity and infant deaths in rural areas due mainly to a poor monitoring of pregnancy progress and lack of appropriate alerting mechanism in case of abnormal gestation evolution. This work proposes an information technology solution based on mobile devices, and health sensors such as ECG (electrocardiogram), stethoscope, pulse-oximeter, and blood-glucose meter to collect automatically relevant health data for a better monitoring of pregnant women. This article addresses the status of the maternity infant death problem especially in rural areas of Mexico. It reviews some applications of IT in health systems (known also as Electronic Health or simply e-Health) and discusses how these are related to the presented proposal and how they differ. The article presents the proposed solution and discuss the current status of the work.
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In the past 10 years Information technology (IT) has been used to improve the accuracy of patient records, and health monitoring. Benefits and challenging unsolved problems continue to be the outcomes of such attempts (Bates, 2003), such as electronic health records, remote monitoring, tele-health, health data collection and processing, and clinical decision support systems, to name a few. Groups interested in the IT-Healthcare efforts have gathered and exchanged opinions to identify technological areas with the highest benefits. These groups integrated by members of the public, health care provider and private sectors selected tele-health and electronic health records, in this order, as the most valuable IT approaches. The groups of interest also identified as a disadvantage the changes in the current practices and processes in the delivery of health services (Jennet et al., 2005).

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