Bloodhub: A context aware system to increase voluntary blood donors' participation

Abstract

WHO in its report in 2010 stated that voluntary blood donor is a crucial component and a core service within health care systems. The existence of voluntary blood donor has saved millions of lives. Few studies showed that that non-remunerated donors have very importance rules to fulfil the blood demands. Unfortunately, according to the same report, WHO concluded that there are many patients who could not meet the clinical demands due to blood stocks limitation which has serious consequences to the health of the patient. Few studies on blood donor motivation have shown that there are factors affecting donors to donate their blood. Some of the reasons on why people do not donate their blood are: their distances are too far from where the blood is needed, and other factor is that they have never been asked to donate their blood. The other problem that affecting the supply of blood donors are to retain or to maintain the loyalty of a donor so that he/she can become regular donor. This paper discusses on how smartphone can help to increase the number of blood donors and improve its retention especially among youth. In this paper, we use a context aware system approach i.e. a system that aware of their environment that is implemented in the smartphone, to allow users of smartphone to receive only relevant information e.g. nearby location where the demand of the blood is there. We also utilizes gamification technique to improve the user loyalty.