The use of mobile technology to manage child health information: An Irish study

The Child Health Information Tracking Application (CHeITA) was developed as a mobile application to enhance information sharing for parents/guardians and to facilitate better collaboration with health care professionals. Currently, there is no standard, single process for tracking vital infant health information from birth weight to vaccinations in Ireland. Subsequently, this project was undertaken as a collaborative research project between a group of Nursing and Midwifery and Information Systems (IS) researchers to develop a mobile solution for capturing, storing and leveraging this information thus providing a single unified view of infant information which can be used to support health care professional decision making when the need arises. During this first phase of research, this mobile android application was built and made available to parents of infants less than one year allowing them to capture a full, complete and real-time instance of their child's health information. A qualitative questionnaire was then conducted in order to further understand if such an application would be used to manage this type of information in the future. CHeITA was positively received by the fifty-five study participants. However the lack of availability of infant data on a longer term basis was met with disappointment, as the mobile app was only supported for a short time period as part of the pilot study.