A Mobile Phone-Based Antenatal Care Support System

Many ICT-based systems used in managing antenatal care are still faced with the problems of inaccessibility, lack of effective consultations and low usability. This paper proposes an architecture, a Mobile Phone-Based Antenatal Care Support System (MPACSS) that addresses the solution to these drawbacks. MPACSS consists of a patient´s mobile phone, hospital server, an Electronic Medical Record System (EMRS), and a doctor´s remote terminal. The patient´s mobile phone has the interface that allows patients registration and login details, with an in-built diagnostic application. The hospital server accepts the patients´ data from the mobile phone and adopts expert system for diagnosis and treatment, while the EMRS manages the database of patients. The doctor´s remote terminal is a mobile device with same interface as the patient´s mobile device. The doctor only makes a request for the physical presentation of patients depending on the level of severity which is calculated based on fuzzy logic paradigm The proposed system is in its current stage of implementation but an evaluation was carried out on 180 pregnant women and 50 doctors. The result showed 92% efficiency of the system by doctor and 95% usability acceptance by pregnant women. This shows that the system can effectively provide antenatal support to women without any time and distance barriers.