Conference paper published by IST-Africa
Malnutrition contributes to over one half of the deaths of children under
age of five years in developing countries and is the single greatest cause of child
mortality in Tanzania. Investigations reveal that the issue of malnutrition is
aggravated by lack of nutritional information especially in rural communities.
Absence of proper tools makes collection, management and access to nutrition
information very difficult. The aim of this study is to improve accessibility of
nutritional information by taking advantage of the advanced mobile technologies to
integrate a mobile-based information management platform with existing Health
Information Systems. The platform will give mothers instant access to nutritional
tips, allow them to interact with nutrition practitioners and help in record keeping. In
this paper, we present the requirements of a mobile application for managing
prenatal and postnatal nutritional information. The requirements have been
established from interviews with the various stakeholders and literature reviews. The
established requirements become a necessary input towards development of a
complete mobile-based nutrition information management platform, which is to be
integrated with existing health information system.