A Mobile Telehealth Application for Rural Namibia

In Namibia, people in the rural and remote areas of the country do not have easy access to healthcare as the nearest health clinics are predominantly manned by nurses since there is a shortage of medical doctors. This paper is a study on how to bridge the gap of an inadequate supply of medical doctors in the rural and remote areas through the use of a mobile application for remote telehealth consultation. The mobile telehealth application can assist in improving healthcare service delivery to rural Namibia. The development of the application follows the Software Development Life Cycle. One of the components of the application is an expert system which stores details on a number of diseases, the likely symptoms as well as treatment options and aids the nurse in the clinic to diagnose and treat patients with certain ailments as a first point of call. It also enables the nurse to consult the doctor directly in real-time. This enables consultations between the nurses, patient and doctor as though they were seemingly in the same room. Another feature of the application is that it allows the doctor to consult specialists in case they are unable to assist the patient. The application supports both text, audio and video for real-time exchange of pictures. Iterative testing as a continuous process was conducted while developing the application.