Public Health Planning and Citizen Engagement: Exploring the Need and the Sustainability of an Open Source Platform for Dengue Prevention in Sri Lanka

The rise of Information Communication Technology (ICT) has offered the world a new and efficient mechanism toincrease active citizen engagement. Growth in open source technology has widened the space for engaging a vastnumber of citizens limitless of geographical and hierarchical boundaries via crowdsourcing real-time data. Eventhough there is a boom in using ICTs in connecting and sharing knowledge and information among differentstakeholders, still, there is a considerable gap in using open source technology in combating public health issuesaround the world. As a country with a high internet usage rate, Sri Lanka still shows underutilization of suchtechnologies in monitoring and preventing non-communicable diseases. Dengue is a serious health threat in SriLanka which shows the need for active surveillance in prevention. The main objective of the paper is to seek thepotential possibility of using the Internet of Things (IoT) in preventing dengue outbreak in Sri Lanka. Also, it aims toidentify the opportunities for using a mobile application and even tries to address the usability issues that could arisewhen introducing and retaining a mobile application. By doing that, this paper will contribute to filling the gap inresearch on functionality and usability issues and also introduces a user-friendly open source application to preventdengue outbreak in Sri Lanka. The proposed development of the mobile platform for dengue prevention hasconsidered the economic and social understanding of people as rational thinkers and collective actors and also hasused the user-friendly guidelines of mobile application development.