Abstract
Malaria is one of the most severe public health problems worldwide. It is estimated that 3.3 billion people live in areas at risk of malaria transmission, and in 2010 caused around 655,000 deaths, 91 % of them in the African Region. In this study we assess if the mHealth application “MalariaScope” developed by Fraunhofer Portugal AICOS (FhP AICOS) found to be usable and satisfactory by users from a European country, Portugal, can achieve similar positive results in an African country, Mozambique, which is one of its intended contexts of use. To this end, an academic partner from that African country conducted locally a usability evaluation of the application following the same procedure with participants with similar scientific backgrounds to the Portuguese counterparts. A comparison of the usability metrics of the two evaluations found no significant differences between the Portuguese and Mozambican set of users.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge the financial support obtained from North Portugal Regional Operational Programme (ON.2 - O Novo Norte), Portuguese National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) from European Union through the project ICT4DCC (ICT4D Competence Center) NORTE-07-0124-FEDER-000042.
Also, our appreciation to the ICT4D Competence Center’s partners, CI-UEM (Informatics Center of University Eduardo Mondlane, Mozambique) and NMMU (Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, South-Africa) for logistical support and revision process.
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Devezas, T., Domingos, L., Vasconcelos, A., Carreira, C., Giesteira, B. (2015). MalariaScope’s User Interface Usability Tests: Results Comparison Between European and African Users. In: Nungu, A., Pehrson, B., Sansa-Otim, J. (eds) e-Infrastructure and e-Services for Developing Countries. AFRICOMM 2014. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 147. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16886-9_25
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16886-9_25
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