Field evaluation of a camera-based mobile health system in low-resource settings

Abstract

The worldwide adoption of mobile devices presents an opportunity to build mobile systems to support health workers in low-resource settings. This paper presents an in-depth field evaluation of a mobile system that uses a smartphone's built-in camera and computer vision to capture and analyze diagnostic tests for infectious diseases. We describe how health workers integrate the system into their daily clinical workflow and detail important differences in system usage between small clinics and large hospitals that could inform the design of future mobile health systems. We also describe a variety of strategies that health workers developed to overcome poor network connectivity and transmit data to a central database. Finally, we show strong agreement between our system's computed diagnoses and trained health workers' visual diagnoses, which suggests that our system could aid disease diagnosis in a variety of scenarios. Our findings will help to guide ministries of health and other stakeholders working to deploy mobile health systems in similar environments.