JultikaUniversity of Oulu repository

Abstract

This thesis work focuses on developing an intelligent mobile application that presents and highlights the health effects of climate change on asthma patients. The Android mobile application ‘EXTREMA’ is targeted towards patients in various scenarios, e.g., health, lifestyle, and education. The ‘EXTREMA’ application receives input from a patient along with smart weather sensor and the GPS (Global Positioning System) location sensor in the smartphone and communicates over the Internet with a remote server (Aware) accessible by research professionals who are in charge of the remote monitoring of the patients.

This thesis outlines the design, implementation, and evaluation via the deployment of a system aimed to help both individual users and researchers to efficiently gather self-reported symptoms data, and medication record according to weather conditions and user location. For gathering the data, there was no direct interaction with the users (asthma patients). However, during and after the development, the final version of the application was tested and evaluated during the thesis. Different measures were taken regarding the performance of the application, such as data loading, number of users, efficiency and accuracy of the weather sensor data.

The major output of the thesis is the application system, which can be used, by users and researchers to record medication and symptoms data in a meaningful format for future use. Hence, the main contribution is also towards improving the health of asthma patients and conducting research in the area.