Smartphone enabled phototherapy irradiance meter for the care of the jaundiced neonates in low-resource regions

Abstract

Smartphones have become near ubiquitous on the global stage placing the power of both computational analytics and communication into the hands of users in both high and low-resource regions alike. The potential to leverage these devices to address inequities in healthcare are enormous. Our development team theorizes that we can create a medical device blending a traditional pediatric phototherapy irradiance meter for the treatment of neonatal jaundice with a mobile smartphone to create a reasonably priced irradiance meter with improved performance specifically for low-resource regions. The result of our work is a minimum viable prototype based on an Android operating system tethered wirelessly to a remote sensor that incorporates a clinical training feature. Based on laboratory tests simulating a clinical environment and field testing in Northern Nigeria, the results were equivalent to standard phototherapy meters with additional expected benefits of cost, mobility, access and clinical training.