Secure M-health system for enhancing a confidential access of HIV/AIDS healthcare information in Tanzania

Abstract

For many years, stigma has been hindering people in the society from freely going to the Care and Treatment Centres (CTCs) to receive the HIV/AIDS healthcare information such as counselling, treatment and HIV/AIDS related education as well as other HIV/AIDS healthcare services. This research focuses on the development of a secure integrated m-health platform for enhancing the HIV/AIDS healthcare information delivery in Tanzania. With this platform, an easy, timely and secured access to relevant HIV/AIDS healthcare information can be achieved without people being disclosed, identified and subjected to the stigma. The Rapid Application Development (RAD) model was adopted during the system development within this study. The system requirements were modelled into the Data Flow Diagram (DFD) in order to obtain the clear flow of the HIV/AIDS healthcare information between the clients and HIV/AIDS healthcare practitioners. With the use of different software development tools and environment such as Android studio, Symfony framework, and PostgreSQL Database; both android application and web-based system were developed. This study developed a secure m-health platform for HIV/AIDS healthcare information delivery. The developed system was tested for individual module functioning as well as the functioning of the fully integrated system. The platform provides a confidential and anonymously one-to-one live communication between a client and an HIV/AIDS healthcare practitioner. Moreover, the system provides the clients with the HIV/AIDS healthcare tips, and nearest CTC among other useful features of the developed system in this research. Finally, the user acceptance survey concluded that the developed system was positively accepted by the users and commended the ministry of health to officially deploy the system for enhanced delivery of HIV/AIDS healthcare information.