Mobile-web Enabled Emergency Communication System: Towards Control of Pandemics in Uganda: A Case of Mulago Hospital Located in Kampala Uganda.

ABSTRACT:
The current procedure for the reporting of infectious disease cases in Uganda contains many manual steps across several levels of the health infrastructure.
This has led to challenges for example, the current staff lacking basic knowledge of data management and analysis and even though weekly reports and time series graphs are produced from the data, the lack of data quality checks and critical evaluation of data limits the efforts to interpret the results.
By transferring case data directly from the hand-held device to a central server at the Ugandan Ministry of Health will promote collection, analysis, interpretation and dissemination of data improving its reliability. More so the time to launch a response to an outbreak can be reduced which was possible through development of mobile –web enabled emergency communication system.
The project scope was limited to Mulago hospital located on Mulago Hill in the northern part of the city of Kampala, immediately west Makerere University College of Health Sciences. The objectives of the study were fulfilled using a number of tools and techniques. In objective one, the study was carried out using data collecting tools like questionnaires and interview guides. In objective two, the project was designed using data flow diagrams and entity relationship diagrams. In objective three, the proposed system was developed using HTML, PHP, CSS, and Java.
In objective four, the developed system was tested using techniques such as unit testing, system integration testing. The system was validated by taking it to users to confirm whether it meets the user requirements.
A validation questionnaire was provided to the users and results were analyzed using excel spreadsheets. From the results of validation, it was realized that the users of the mobile-web enabled emergency communication system; is easy to learn and use (5%), compatible with all mobile phones (10%), user friendly (15%), enable user interaction (70%).
It was discovered that the mobile web-web enabled emergency communication tool is not compatible on all mobile phones because it was programmed for mobile phones powered by android operating system.