ReportFishDisease: a GPS-enabled mobile application for supporting e-governance in aquatic animal disease management through systematic disease reporting and surveillance

Abstract

Diseases are the most significant constraint to the sustainable growth of aquaculture. Therefore, surveillance for aquatic animal diseases is essential for early detection of diseases which is important for management of endemic diseases and eradication or containment of exotic or emerging diseases. Often, many disease incidences in aquaculture go unreported due to unavailability of the field-level disease reporting mechanism. Therefore, there is a necessity of a mechanism that can connect farmers, field-level officers and fish health experts for strengthening the farmer-based disease reporting. Keeping the same in consideration, for improving the reporting of aquatic animal diseases in the country, an android-based GPS-enabled mobile application named as ‘ReportFishDisease (RFD)’ has been developed. Using the RFD app, the farmers can report incidence of disease in finfish, shrimps and molluscs on their farms to the field level-officers and fish disease experts as and when required, and get timely scientific advice for efficient management of diseases. The data regarding the diseases is being stored on temporal and spatial scale and can be used for mapping the disease cases. It is expected that the app would help in improving farmer-based reporting, getting scientific advice and reducing losses due to diseases.