Reducing Infant mortality using mobile applications : a paper on the potential impact of using technology to increase vaccination in infants

Abstract

Today’s world is characterised by professionals who have minimal time with their families and especially their young children. Working mothers find it hard to keep track of the vaccines their babies have received and there exists no mechanisms to remind the mothers of the same. This paper proposes the development of a mobile application to increase the number of children who get timely vaccination in line with the attainment of United Nations Millennium Development Goal 4 (MDG4). This application is aimed to be used by working mothers for tracking vaccination dates for infants below 12 months of age. The Chanjo App is to be located in Kenya, where the target demography is found.Using the Object Oriented Analysis and Design methodology,the plan is to develop an application that will allow mothers to plan their infant’s immunisation as well as receive timely notifications on their schedule. This will be aided by the current boom in the uptake of smartphones (android and iOS) in the Kenyan consumer space [6]. It can be rightly assumed that the system can be implemented in numbers sufficient to achieve the MDG4 goal.