Enhancing management of nutrition information using mobile application: Prenatal and postnatal requirements

Malnutrition contributes to over one half of the deaths of children under age of five years in developing countries and is the single greatest cause of child mortality in Tanzania. Investigations reveal that the issue of malnutrition is aggravated by lack of nutritional information especially in rural communities. Absence of proper tools makes collection, management and access to nutrition information very difficult. The aim of this study is to improve accessibility of nutritional information by taking advantage of the advanced mobile technologies to integrate a mobile-based information management platform with existing Health Information Systems. The platform will give mothers instant access to nutritional tips, allow them to interact with nutrition practitioners and help in record keeping. In this paper, we present the requirements of a mobile application for managing prenatal and postnatal nutritional information. The requirements have been established from interviews with the various stakeholders and literature reviews. The established requirements become a necessary input towards development of a complete mobile-based nutrition information management platform, which is to be integrated with existing health information system.