My Baby Growth: Electronic Monitoring of Baby Growth

The health sector insists on the accurate keeping of baby growth and immunization records and presenting these on every visit to the doctor or health center. Baby growth and immunization records in some cases are still kept on paper. Paper-based monitoring systems that heavily depend on baby cards pose a challenge to both mothers and caregivers. The card may be lost, smudged, or forgotten at home when trying to seek health assistance. In some cases, mothers forget the date of the next visit, endangering the health of the baby. This paper presents a web-based baby-growth monitoring system that keeps track of selected parameters to monitor baby growth, comparing these with the expected normal, to recommend corrective measures. Our contribution in this paper is an application that eases the process of keeping track of the next baby clinic visits while giving mothers and guardians nutritional advice for healthy baby growth. We build security into the system by modeling both functional and security requirements. This system can be of use to mothers and guardians as it relieves them of the burden of taking care of the card and, at the same time keeping track of the next visit. Medical caregivers can also benefit from the ease provided by the system in gauging baby growth. The health sector can also use the system to derive district and provincial growth averages of children in a country, and thus make necessary policy interventions, based on accurate data.