This research article published by Scientific Research Publishing, 2018
Reducing maternal and infant deaths’ rates in the developing countries, particularly in sub-Sahara Africa, remain a big challenge. Despite efforts by governments, the reductions have been unsatisfactory. To accelerate the reduction in maternal and infant deaths, m-health has been proposed as a viable,
economical and effective intervention, able to reach the low income and disadvantaged groups. Mobile phone-based applications are among the m-health
interventions that have been found to have positive outcomes for different
healthcare challenges, such as improving clinical attendance and skilled delivery, and reducing perinatal mortality. However, the adoption of smartphone-based applications for health in Tanzania has been slow. Some of the
likely contributing factors might be low technology exposure by the majority
of the population and English language skills’ limitations. In this work, we
developed a mobile application for providing interactive support to users,
thus complementing other solutions available such as SMS and other smartphone apps. The main advantage of this app is the presence of interactive
features that enable patient-provider communication. We adopted the Rapid
application development (RAD) model for developing the application. We
used UML modeling language tools for designing the application. The mobile
application’s technical architecture uses various technologies and system development tools such as PHP programming language for the web application,
MySQL database manage