A location-based mobile alert model for blood bank
Date
2013
Authors
Mundama, A. Benjamin
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Strathmore University
Abstract
Blood safety encompasses actions aimed at ensuring that everyone has access to blood and blood products that are as safe as possible, available at reasonable cost, adequate to meet the needs of patients. Blood safety remains an important public health concern in Africa where lack of availability or provision of unsafe blood adversely impacts morbidity and mortality in the region.
Blood typing discrepancies can result from errors made not only by the medical staff during phlebotomy but also to the clerical staff during registration and identification. In an emergency situation, an uncertain comprehensive location of a needed blood type may result into a tragedy. There is lack of comprehensive location of blood donors or blood banks, especially matching a specific patient’s blood type in Kenya.
On the other hand, the world of telecommunications, mobile communications continues to evolve with innovative technologies and high-speed data services. This thesis, proposes a Location-based Mobile Alert Model for Blood Bank to provide a comprehensive location of blood donors or blood banks that match a requested blood group.
Our Location-based Mobile Alert Model takes advantage of the existing telecommunications infrastructure teamed with a blood bank information technology to study possibilities to provide a comprehensive location of blood units matching a patient’s blood group. The study presents a hybrid positioning mechanism built into an alert mobile application that uses an unstructured supplementary service data (USSD) technology to be the inherent layout that will help achieve this.
The application was tested through simulation of scenarios to evaluate the system availability and reliability in the Nairobi region. Ninety point six percent (90.6%) of the participants who took part (29 out of 32) in the exercise successfully received an immediate feedback with the location information of the nearest blood bank, while the remaining nine point four percent (9.4%) participants received a feedback but with a delay greater than 3 minutes. Therefore our model achieved a mobile alert mechanism.
Description
Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Science in Information Technology
Keywords
Location-based mobile alert, Blood bank