Development of a Mobile Software Tool for Diabetes Diagnosis

This paper reports on the design and implementation of a mobile diagnostic tool for diabetes. Diabetes is a chronic, often deadly, disease which occurs when the pancreas does not produce enough insulin or when the body cannot effectively use the produced insulin. Globally, at least 422 million people are affected by diabetes in 2014, and it accounted for about 1.5 million deaths in 2012. It is most common to the Pacific and Middle East countries and mostly affects adults between the ages of 35 and 64. Lack of early diagnosis of diabetes can lead to many complications and even death, hence the need for low-cost mobile diagnostic tools which could lead to prevention and early management of diabetes. The Formhub platform was used to develop the mobile tool and it was downloaded and tested on Android smartphones with ODKCollect. The developed tool diagnoses diabetes using blood glucose test results, determines the type of diabetes and the likelihood of a person having diabetes in the future, using the risk calculation mechanism.