I.J. Information Engineering and Electronic Business, 2020, 4, 40-52
Published Online August 2020 in MECS (http://www.mecs-press.org/)
DOI: 10.5815/ijieeb.2020.04.05
Copyright © 2020 MECS I.J. Information Engineering and Electronic Business, 2020, 4, 40-52
Development and Evaluation of Mobile
Telenursing System for Drug Administration
Emuoyibofarhe O. Justice
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Ladoke Akintola University of Technology, Ogbomoso, Oyo State, Nigeria
Email: eojustice@gmail.com
Adigun J. Olusegun
Federal College of Wildlife Management
New Bussa, Niger State, Nigeria
Email: sunkanmisegun@gmail.com
Emuoyiborfarhe N. Ozichi
Department of Computer Science
Bowen University, Iwo, Osun State, Nigeria
Email: eozichi@yahoo.com
Received: 03 November 2019; Accepted: 23 December 2019; Published: 08 August 2020
Abstract: Mobile telenursing is an emerging sub-field of mobile health that proposes remote nursing care provision
with the aim of reducing stress on nurses by enabling them to spend more time on direct patient care rather than indirect
care. Most existing mobile telenursing systems are limited to a simple phone call and Short Message Service (SMS)
alert thereby rendering them inadequate to support indirect patient cares such as remote prescription based on
consultant’s advice and monitoring of drug usage adherence. Hence, this research developed a Mobile Telenursing and
Drug Administration System (MTS) characterized by support for the aforementioned indirect patient cares. Domain-
Driven Design was employed in designing MTS client-server architecture and its framework. The framework was
implemented by developing an SMS reminder system and client mobile application which maintains real-time
communication with the webserver. The MTS, which supports real-time consultation between nurse-patient and nurse-
consultant, was developed for mobile devices running the Android operating system using the framework implemented.
The MTS was programmed using JavaScript and Pusher real-time messaging library of the Android development Kits.
The performance of the MTS was evaluated through users’ assessment by administering a set of questionnaire on
purposively selected 64 nurses; 53 patients chosen from four (4) purposively selected hospitals (General Hospital, New
Bussa; Bowen University Teaching Hospital, Ogbomoso; Alimosho General Hospital, Lagos and Ifako-Ijaiye General
Hospital, Lagos). The responses obtained from the questionnaires were statistically evaluated to determine MTS
suitability for drug usage monitoring, remote prescription, palliative care, injection administration, patients’ clean -up
and follow-up treatment using a correlation test. Also, mean effectiveness and mean acceptability of MTS were
evaluated using a t-test at 0.05 level of significance. The MTS was deployed on mobile devices running the Android
operating system. The results of performance evaluation revealed that MTS recorded suitability values of drug usage
monitoring (r = 0.656), remote prescription (r = 0.829), palliative care (r = 0.925), injection administration (r = -0.772),
patients’ clean-up (r = -0.841) and follow-up treatment (r = 0.868) of patients at (p < 0.05). Similarly, MTS recorded
mean effectiveness and acceptability values of 3.596 and 3.32, 3.770 and 3.36 at (p < 0.05) for nurses and patients,
respectively. The research developed MTS which is suitable for the provisioning of remote nursing care and drug
administration without breaking basic medical ethics. The system can be adopted for mobile telenursing and drug
administration system.
Index Terms: Drug usage Adherence, Mobile Health, Mobile Telenursing, Remote Prescription.
1. Introduction
The proliferation of mobile applications, mobile devices with wireless capabilities, increasing access to the internet
and reduction in the cost of internet access has enabled mobile systems to find increasing applicability. More so, mobile
systems possess capabilities that enable their usage in a myriad of applications that could not be sensibly implemented