A Mobile Health Intervention to Support TB Eradication Programme for Adherence to Treatment and a Novel QR Code Based Technique to Monitor Patient–DOTS Provider Interaction

Tuberculosis (TB) continues to be a major public health burden in India as the number of new cases still is in ascending trend. The major challenges lie in adherence of treatment of identified cases which involve treating them by ensuring the patient is completing full course of treatment with proper medication. Deviation from proper medication might lead to drug-resistant TB which will be even more complicated to get treated. World Health Organization recommends Directly Observed Therapy (DOT) as a measure for TB control strategy but challenge lies in patient visiting to health clinics regularly for treatment supervision. Alternate choice could be community based DOT(CB-DOT) since they are acceptable and accessible to the patient. The proposed mobile health (mHealth) based solution to support TB programmer objectives is a smart phone based application framework named TB track. The smart phone app is used by patients as well as DOTS provider helps in adhering to proper medication. This is achieved by proper monitoring of patients medicine intake, educating and motivating them during different phase of treatment through TB track smart app. The app also helps the patients in reporting symptoms during the phase of treatment. TB track app has a novel QR Code based technique for remote monitoring the patient-DOTS provider interaction. The mobile apps are designed to address common people with mobile HCI in mind. All the data collected from patient interaction with smart app such as their regular medicine intake, symptoms occurring during phase of treatment are saved in storage environment in web which can be used for data analytics.