Following the advent of the novel Coronavirus, the governments and authorities introduced various mobile applications in the fight against COVID-19. However, these are either restricted by the developer country or not comprised of certain key features, due to which, a vast population from the low- or middle-income country, remains underprivileged from associated benefits. The purpose of this study is to explore and demonstrate how to build a comprehensive and easy-to-use application for mobile health service delivery especially fabricated to fight communicable diseases like COVID-19. Mostly open-source technologies are used to build a distributed scalable client-server application. Then the application is evaluated with the stress-test and usability-test. Besides COVID-19 advisories and guidelines, the study demonstrates complete conceptualization and development of an IoT-based mobile application. It comprises three key features that bring comprehensiveness. One is the ‘contact logger & tracer’ that enables users to maintain a list of contacts who get notified if any of them reported COVID-19 positive in the last 14 days. Two is the ‘self-assessment' which helps users to predict the chances of COVID-19 infection using a scientific rationale. Three is the ‘infection tracker’ that guides users to identify infected hotspots to plan the route accordingly. The usability-test affirmed that the application is easy-to-use. Further, this study demonstrates how to construct such an easy-to-use application mostly with open-source resources. It can help the needy authorities or groups from resource-constrained countries to adopt and develop such applications quickly. Further research on the post-implementation effect will add value to this study.
A comprehensive easy-to-use techno-human solution for the resource-constrained nations in the fight against communicable disease like the Coronavirus Pandemic