Android Mobile Informatics Application for some Hereditary Diseases and Disorders (AMAHD): a complementary framework for medical practitioners and patients

Hereditary diseases and disorders constitute a public health problem. Many people in rural communities of developing countries of the world are particularly ignorant about the cause, modes of transmissions and the treatment plans for such diseases. In some cases, some people lack essential knowledge between common and rare hereditary diseases.

It is therefore appropriate and essential to develop a mobile application that will act as an educative resource and a good knowledge base for common and rare hereditary diseases.

The aim of this research is to develop AMAHD (Android Mobile Informatics Application for some Hereditary Diseases and Disorders).

The objectives of this research are to create an android mobile application that will act as a reference point and provide useful information about various hereditary diseases to medical personnel and professionals; provide additional educational resource to biological and bioinformatics researchers in different higher institutions; and provide a pedagogical, diagnostic and complementary foundational learning tool for African research students in biosciences, bioinformatics, and all other categories of students that currently engage in multidisciplinary research in the aspect of hereditary diseases.

Essential data was sourced from relevant literature. We developed AMAHD through an integration of programming languages in Java and XML (Extended Markup Language). SQLite was used to implement the database. We developed a Logical Disjunction Rule-based Algorithm (LDRA) for the AMAHD’s diagnosis module.

A comparative analysis between existing commercial hereditary mobile applications and AMAHD was conducted and the results presented. A world-wide online survey (spanning Africa, Asia, Europe, America and Australia) was conducted to sample the opinion of individuals across the globe on the classification of hereditary diseases as either rare or common, within their respective regions. In addition, an evaluation of AMAHD on the offline platform was conducted by administering paper questionnaires and asking users direct questions about how they respectively rate the performance of AMAHD based on certain evaluation criteria. Furthermore, a separate evaluation of AMAHD was conducted using online survey monkey. Finally, a comparative analysis between the results obtained from the online evaluation and offline evaluation of AMAHD was conducted and presented.

The results of the surveymonkey online questionnaire revealed that: 58.49% of the participants agreed that AMAHD can be used to diagnose users ailments based on the hereditary disease symptoms they supplied to the mobile application; 13.21% disagreed, while 28.30% of the participants were indifferent. 71.7% of the participants agreed that AMAHD can act as a complementary resource for supplementary healthcare support; 5.66% disagreed, while 22.64% of the participants were indifferent. 88.46% of the participants agreed that AMAHD can be particularly supportive to developing countries where there is less awareness of the deadly effects on hereditary diseases; 1.92% disagreed, while 9.62% were indifferent. Finally, 86.79% of the participants agreed that AMAHD can be useful as an android health application, 13.21% disagreed.

& 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).