Improving Childhood Immunizations with Cellular Technology

Sanjay Jain of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in the U.S. and colleagues in the U.S. and India will develop a cloud-based platform to record the location, caregiver relationships, and immunization records of infants in developing countries, and provide personalized reminders and incentives via mobile phone to improve the coverage of childhood immunizations. Low immunization coverage has been linked to inaccurate or incomplete records, and the difficulties of encouraging follow-up immunizations and identifying those who miss them. Their platform will store data in a cloud to ensure universal access to records, and use fingerprint identification of the caregiver for accuracy. It will also document each child's care network and location, and use this to send multiple text message reminders, and manage group and combined vaccinations to improve efficiency. They will test their approach in a low-resource rural community by training health workers equipped with mobile tablets, and recruiting around 800 mothers with infants or pregnant women provided with mobile phones.