In developing countries, most of the 11 million deaths per year of children under the age of five years occur in areas where adequate medical care is not available. In Malawi, the under-five mortality rate is 133 per 1,000 live births. First-level health facilities – the closest health care services available to most sick children in developing countries are generally run by local medical physicians. The WHO and UNICEF developed the Integrated Management of Childhood Illness (IMCI) as a strategy to improve childhood survival and disease control. The IMCI strategy uses simple signs and symptoms to assess and classify illness, thus allowing health workers at first-level facilities to identify which children have minor illnesses that need symptomatic treatment.
Our proposal addresses the objectives of this call by assisting health care workers through the utilisation of established technologies to circumvent the absence of health infrastructures. It achieves this by utilising the cellular network, patient sensor technologies, and decision support systems.
Proposed is the Supporting Low-cost Intervention For disEase control (Supporting LIFE) project. It is designed to run in rural settings as a platform for delivering community-level interventions to improve and manage disease control. This project has a target age group of children under the age of 5 years.
Supporting LIFE targets disease control in a multi-target intervention. It helps to ensure accurate diagnosis for those most affected by malaria/infantile diarrhoea (children under 5 years) and helps to ensure accurate and prompt treatment thus providing accurate real-time disease statistics in an area by monitoring symptom trends (e.g. fever/diarrhoea) centrally. It targets other common disease entities which are major causes of morbidity and mortality such as pneumonia thereby increasing its utility. It reduces barriers to care by providing expert systems at low cost to people at their closest point of contact.
