Android application for therapeutic feed and fluid calculation in neonatal care - a way to fast, accurate and safe health-care delivery

Abstract

Delivering medical care to newborn babies in their early days of life, involves complex mathematical calculation for feeding, intravenous fluid and electrolytes requirements. Manual calculation of this process is time consuming and potential source of medical error. This work proposes a standalone Android application for newborn care unit, which can run in any handheld Android device like mobile phones and helps health-care professionals to calculate certain parameters regarding the feed and intravenous fluid to be given to a newborn baby. The parameters are - total fluid intake, Glucose Infusion Rate, energy, protein, lipid amount, electrolytes, etc. Its logic is based on the medical guidelines for feed and fluid management of newborn babies. It maintains consistency in a large set of inter-related variables using an existential abstraction approach excluding the possibility of having wrong proportions of dextrose, protein, lipid or fluid volume by showing error and warning messages wherever needed, which acts as a safety measure to avoid medication errors. The objective of the work is to make the medical calculation process faster, safer and accurate. A prototype of the application is being tested in a Sick Newborn Care Unit (SNCU) in Kolkata,India for evaluation.