Developing Mobile Tracking Applications For Patient Treatment
Hussain Mohammad Abu-Dalbouh1
1College of Arts and Sciences at Unaizah, Computer Science Department, Qassim University, Al-Qassim, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Correspondence: Hussain Mohammad Abu-Dalbouh, College of Arts and Sciences at Unaizah, Computer Sciences Department, Qassim University, Al-Qassim, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. E-mail: [email protected]
Received: October XX, 201X Accepted: November XX, 201X Online Published: November XX, 201X
doi:10.5539/ URL: http://dx.doi.org/
Abstract
Much of the adjunct technology developed for using among medical environments is targeted towards computers. Because the hospitals face increasing demands to participate in a very big selection of quality improvement activities, the role and influence of using mobile applications in these efforts is additionally increasing. Healthcare professionals spend much of their time wandering between patients and offices, while the supportive technology stays stationary. This paper presents a study performed using the mobile application for storing and following up patients status. Therefore, mobile application for tracking patient progress is proposed to minimize such challenges and demands, by allowing physicians and nurses to trace the patients’ conditions a lot of expeditiously and simply. The experimental results conclude that the working environment would be improved by supporting the mobile workers with mobile technology.
Keywords: mobile, tracking system, healthcare, system, patient
1. Introduction
According to Gover and Huray (2000) the last three decades, developing of medical technology has been the most engine that has driven the spectacular advances in the ability to diagnose and treat several human diseases. This has reduced mortality and morbidity for millions people. Medical prices paid by the governments grow thus chop-chop that it will be necessary to scale back alternative areas of country disbursement. Technology plays a significant role in each field of contemporary development and is a necessary tool in health care.
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Abu-Dalbouh (2013) said that mobile technology and handhelds have offered a chance to produce a brand new generation of individuals with suggests that to move with activities regardless of location. On the whole, Abu-Dalbouh (2014) discussed that possibility with the speedy development of mobile communication and wireless technologies, business activities can cut loose from the limitation of the region and time step by step that bring the continued influences on organizations (Lihua, 2005). Mobile computing applications permit anytime, anyplace access to the web and company intranets.
The physicians at numerous hospitals face several issues with chase the patient’s standing, wherever in natural case doctor still depends on paper to record and track the patient’s standing progress, within the alternative words chase has been done manually. This will cause damages, misplaced and loss of some papers about data of the patients. Additionally, nurses and physicians ought to check the patient standing daily and report on the progress of the patient. Therefore such manual case forced the physicians to trace all the patients and browse their reports. Chase manually is taken into account inefficient and time overwhelming. This some patient’s standing is provided by the reports while not the requirement for the physicians checking. Some orders are often given to nurses to attain the task and a few cases cannot watch for the physicians checking spherical. In addition, patients are not frequently given written information regarding their care and treatment, creating it tough for doctors and nurses to recollect and manage their care effectively. To mitigate the above-mentioned problems this paper aimed to develop a handheld resolution that might support hospitals in chase patients progress and overcomes these difficult.
2. Literature Review
Physicians need to examine and to use an expansion of treatments to patients. Whereas not up their instrumentation and technology, they will face an enormous challenge. Therefore, health care administrators an invariably looking for the foremost recent technologies which can improve the output. In hospital system, one refined issue will slow down the geographical point, in trying to remain track of what is occurring throughout the health care system with every patient. Their orders, lab, radiology, and completely different pertinent results, and even general information like nurses allotted to them on a particular shift a necessary to remain the flow of care. Delaying this flow can consume time of the strategy of their care. Thus on face the time consumption, code companies an invariably looking for new and improved ways that during which to assist health care suppliers in higher managing personnel and time constraints.
2.1 Mobile Application
These days, with the increasing growth in technologies, mobile devices being employed in several fields like agriculture, medical, following and learning. Mobile devices became wide used technology. The most aim is to change communication and data access anyplace and anytime (Fogg, 1999). Moveable device is incidental users most of the time. Thus, makes it a motivating platform for building convenient applications which will show output any half within the world (Ichikawa, Chipchase and Grignani, 2005). Mobile devices a used normally in existence to speak, coordinate and to access data. Additionally (Abu-Dalbouh, 2013) attention professionals pay abundant of their time wandering between patients and offices, whereas the supportive technology stays stationary. Therefore, mobile applications has custom-made for attention business.
2.2 Mobile Application in Health Care Area
For the bulk of handheld strategy for developing health care, handheld firms got to style and supply a system that is useful and simple access the knowledge in health care databases. Moreover, within the reality the cell phones started exploitation computers (applications like PDA) to facilitate mutual feedback on the health care setting effectiveness like clinical skills analysis, support continuous quality improvement initiative, give treatment and watching services. In line with Suomi (2003) health professional is contestation to use computers and mobile applications with transactions through the web. The patients place pressure on health care suppliers like contacted through phone or via the web.
Figure 1. The new generation of mobile phone
2.3 Handhelds in Health Care
Based on Lu et al (2005) portable devices have proven to be well-liked in medical practices, it is hottest as a result of it ready to store an enormous amounts of knowledge within the pocket. A mobile shopper permits remote access to reference material, clinical workplace knowledge and patient health states via a wireless affiliation. (Berglund et al., 2007) Have indicated a study among the workers at a Swedish county hospital wherever doctors and nurses had high expectations of mobile information support systems. A pilot study was conducted of interviews that showed that physicians would like a mobile tool for accessing such information regarding patients, a data information and functions to ease and standardize everyday tasks. It also, is having the ability to know the patient’s case and to come to a decision quickly for a patient’s condition. Thus, there is required for mobile access to the data. The study conjointly showed that the nurses area unit involved regarding not intrusive with the interaction between the workers and patient. The tool ought to be simple to use therefore the treating workers focus will stay on the patient and to not the Personal Digital Assistance (PDA). The doctors and nurses state that access to check results and reference values has the very best priority once wanting in patient information.
In (Fischer et al., 2003) it is declared that the most resources to boost medical work would be mobile accessible. Significantly, within the treatment data databases, following patient health, price following and prescription of prescription drugs. (Lu et al., 2005; Fischer et al., 2003) has each conducted analysis programs to supply review articles on hand-held computing utilized in medical environments up till 2004. The most supply for each articles is phone system and different medical reference libraries. The studies don’t discuss gains in quality or collaboration to the extent that might be found in Human Computer Interaction (HCI), Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) or mobile information science analysis fields. The articles reviewed were in the main targeted on the sensible use of mobile medical applications. Quality and communication area unit mentioned the advantages of the retrieval and use of patient and medical data area unit the most theme. Accessing to medical data wherever and once required is that the common divisor which might create hand-held devices a valuable contribution to medical work.
2.4 Mobility Health Care
Lu et al (2005) said that mobility in health care usually enchained that a lot of quality would improve patient care and permit hospital personnel to pay longer with patients and reduced the time of gathering data. The handheld device would provide the user a lot of freedom to arrange and pay their time. The special restrictions obligatory by stationary data network forces the user into a pattern wherever a “home base” has to be visited at intervals to assemble data for current and additional work activities. A mobile answer aids the user by providing up to now data on any location, and conjointly permitting a lot of fluent time schedule wherever necessary events is noticed and acted upon. (Luff, Heath and Singh, 1998) Have found that participants in studies of varied settings have faith in their own quality and also the quality of artefacts to be ready to coordinate activities with others. In their study of the introduction of pc based mostly records into the medical consultation they explored however the technology has undermined collaboration. Ancient paper records support collaboration between each clinicians and alternative professionals, and between patient and also the practitioner. Luff and Heath categorical that paper records function a very important resource for communication and collaboration and area unit, even with the introduction of processed systems, a very important resource in skilled practice. The paper becomes necessary due to its portability; it is passed around, be carried around, and be affected between completely different elements of a location. It is same that once developing mobile technologies to support collaboration between users, developers got to explore in additional detail however objects area unit utilized in interactions wherever quality is crucial.
(Lundberg and Sandahl, 1999) Stressed the importance of artefacts in a surroundings wherever written paper features a price itself. A paper act as a token and also the shelf acts as a live of the employment. Actions like moving a document from one table to a different, face-to-face discussions and the utilization of boards for programming influences totally different quite reciprocity in medical work. In another article (Lundberg and Tellioglu, 1999) concludes that translating the coordinating role of paper documents and alternative coupled artefacts to pc systems could be a challenge as a result of artefacts a part of a shared infrastructure and desires to be higher understood. Lundberg and Tellioglu explained that system designers have to be compelled to perceive the advanced coordination of labor in a corporation so as to support coordination. An angle towards artefacts should be thought-about once presenting information on a handheld device rather than the binders used nowadays. The impact of exploitation handheld devices in medical work instead of stationary computers would be high, the traditional modes of operational in a hospital surroundings is by wandering between totally different locations of labor (Kristoffersen and Ljungberg,1998) Adding frequent derails to the present work flow for visiting a stationary pc would be to attenuate the impact, particularly if an issue can’t be answered whereas being with a patient and also the practitioner has to leave to search out the answers for that question. For the bulk of mobile device strategy for developing attention. Abu-Dalbouh and Almueit (2013) have designed and provided a system that is useful and simple access the data in health care databases. Additionally for pursuit in patient progress in hospital.
Abu-Dalbouh (2014) planned a mobile health model that would support hospitals in pursuit patient’s progress and improve the standard care in hospitals. It permits physicians and nurses to trace the patients’ conditions additional expeditiously and simply. It conjointly ready to assist in crucial clinical selections 24/7 and out there on decision where physicians to manage their care method from begin to end and from within and out of doors the hospital.
3. Proposed System Design
Mobile Tracking on Patient Progress System (m-TOPP) has designed and implemented to check the feasibility of the proposed mobile model that has been planned and to check the efficiency of introducing mobility to patient tracking. The proposed mobile tracking on patient progress system designed to support two types of users, Doctor and Nurse.
The functionality of a system as Doctor Actor, after login as a Doctor, requires entering the patient ID to View Patient Information, Manage Patient Progress, View Patient State, Enter Patient State and View Patient History. While as Nurse Actor, after login as a Nurse, requires entering patient ID to View Patient Information and View Patient State. Figure 2 shows the functionality of both actors.
Figure 2. Main Use Case for m-TOPP system
The following snapshots explain the prototype design.
Figure 3. Main page
The main page displays the title of the system and two types of logging (Login for doctor and login for nurse).
Figure 4. Log in page
After pressing the doctor button in the main page, the prototype displays a page to enter a user ID and password
Figure 5. Patient ID page
Entering Patient ID by the doctor to view patient information and manage patient progress.
Figure 6. Patient profile
Figure 6 shows that the doctor can see the patient profile such as name, age, gender, check in, room number and patient ID.
Figure 7. Managing patient progress page
For managing patient progress page, it contains three buttons: view patient state, view history patient state and enter the patient state.
Figure 8. View patient state
View patient state enables the doctor to see the latest patient condition (state) that recorded in the patient file.
Figure 9. Patient history
View history patient state enables the doctor to see all patient conditions (state) that was recorded in the patient file. It shows the three patient states, the doctor can check these entered states using first and last buttons.
4. Result and Discussion
In the user experiments of the m-TOPP system, we asked 30 responders (8 doctors and 22 nurses) to use and discover the m-TOPP system for several minutes and evaluate it.
All the responders were Doctors and Nurses belonging to the targeted hospital, the scope of this study. All variables were measured using 5- points Likert scale (Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Natural, Agree and Strongly Agree). From the study, the descriptive statistics for the highest items in Table 1. The charts below detail of these 3 highest items.
Table 1.Top 3 Highest Items
ITEMS MEAN ST.DEV
m-TOPP system allows the doctor to follow up the patient state from outside of the hospital 4.033 0.8087
It is easy to become skilful of using m-TOPP system 3.97 0.900
It is easy to interact with m-TOPP system by using a mobile phone 3.97 0.89
Figure 10. Item 1 statistic
Figure 11. Item 2 statistic
Figure 12. Item 3 statistic
The descriptive statistics for the main variables in Table 2 and Figure 5 revealed that all dimensions charted higher than the midpoints of their respective scales. It shows that respondents are generally optimistic about the Perceived Usefulness (PU) and Ease of Use (PEU) about using the m – TOPP system.
Table 2. Descriptive for the main variables
Variable MEAN ST.DEV
Perceived of Usefulness
Perceived ease of Use 3.92575
3.8825 0.849925
0.945
User Satisfaction 3.756667 1.078667
Attribute of Usability 3.813333 0.989667
Figure 13. Descriptive for the main variables
Both Expert users agreed for the contribution of the m-TOPP in the healthcare sector and the answers were satisfactory. They found that the m-TOPP system is:
Easy to use
Language is clear
Interaction is clear and understandable
Useful in the rapid retrieval of information
Save the time
Overcome the loss or damage of some patient information
Applicable and efficient
The respondents and the expert users proved that the m-TOPP system allows the doctor to follow up the patient state from outside of the hospital, enable the doctor and nurse to get the information of the patient quickly and will save the time of doctor and nurse. Additionally, it is useful for rapid retrieval of information about the patients. Therefore, based on the results of this evaluation, the m-TOPP system shows promise as a tool and a highly effective modality for tracking the patient condition more efficiently and easily and overcomes the damages, misplaced and loss of some papers relating to information of the patients by using mobile model.
5. Conclusion
During recent years, stress on rising the standard of care provided by the hospitals has increased considerably and continues to achieve momentum. as a result of doctors and nurses are integral to hospitalized following patient’s progress and polar in hospital efforts to enhance quality, Therefore, the demand now is making new must facilitate and create higher selections as using the mobile application heading in the right direction patient’s progress. Therefore, projected mobile following on the patient progress system is bestowed during this paper. By incorporating mobile following on Patient Progress the doctor will follow up the case of the patient from outside the hospital’s to enter the system paradigm and noted the quantity of modification supported reports keep. It also, doctors and nurses will track the state of patient a lot of expeditiously. The proposed system it is simple for the doctors and nurses to share data concerning state of patients. Doctor ready to assist in crucial clinical selections 24/7 and offered on decision where doctors to manage their care method from begin to end and from within and outdoors the hospital. Therefore this study is developed a handheld solution that could support hospitals in tracking patient’s progress. In the hospital where this study was conducted the doctors and nurses face problems to track the patients state and share the information of the patients. By using the proposed system the doctors can enter patient state, view patient state, view patient history and view patient information. It also allow nurses to view patient information and view patient state. It enables the doctors and nurses to take data and information of patient through mobile application such as personal digital assistance (PDAs).
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