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| ORIGINAL ARTICLE |
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| Year : 2020 |
Volume
: 45 | Issue : 4 | Page
: 473-477 |
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Development and evaluation of a mobile app for guiding rabies prophylaxis among health-care professionals in India
Muralidhar Swathi1, Sasidharanpillai Sabeena1, Jazeel Abdulmajeed1, Sarthak Pattanaik1, Oliver Dsa1, HS Shubha2, Muralidhar Varma3, Puneet Bhatt1, Nagaraja Ravishankar4, Govindakarnavar Arunkumar1
1 Manipal Institute of Virology, Manipal Academy of Higher Education (Deemed to be University), Manipal, Karnataka, India
2 School of Communications, Manipal Academy of Higher Education (Deemed to be University), Manipal, Karnataka, India
3 Department of General Medicine, Kasturba Medical College, Manipal Academy of Higher Education (Deemed to be University), Manipal, Karnataka, India
4 Department of Data Science, Manipal Academy of Higher Education (Deemed to be University), Manipal, Karnataka, India
Correspondence Address:
Dr. Sasidharanpillai Sabeena
Manipal Institute of Virology, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal - 576 104, Karnataka
India
 Source of Support: None, Conflict of Interest: None  | Check |
DOI: 10.4103/ijcm.IJCM_510_19
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Background: The majority of dog-mediated human rabies as well as rabies-related human deaths are reported from low-income countries of Asia and Africa where access to appropriate postexposure prophylaxis is limited or nonexistent. At present, India is second in position after China in terms of having the highest number of mobile phone users surpassing the United States. Objective: In this context, we decided to develop a user-friendly, technically less demanding, mobile App for health-care professionals, which is accessible even without Internet facility. Methodology: The current study was conducted in four phases, namely assemblage of informational contents on rabies, development of the software, assessment of the reliability of the questionnaire tool and evaluation of the mobile App. The evaluation of App was conducted among physicians and nursing staffs in a tertiary care referral hospital. Results: The information content was prepared referring national and international guidelines. The App was designed with Hypertext Markup Language 5 for presentation on the World Wide Web and was coined the name of “RabiApp.” This is a hybrid App of the native App and web App, allowing the information to be stored in the local server. The mobile App was assessed using a validated and reliable questionnaire after confirming the internal consistency by means of Cronbach's alpha. The overall Cronbach's alpha for the main scale was 0.788, which was a respectable score. Conclusion: The developed App is a user-friendly, easily accessible platform, which can help health-care professionals in making decisions regarding rabies wound management, treatment, and prophylaxis.
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