Smartphone enabled phototherapy irradiance meter for the care of the jaundiced neonates in low-resource regions

Smartphones have become near ubiquitous on the global stage placing the power of both computational analytics and communication into the hands of users in both high and low-resource regions alike. The potential to leverage these devices to address inequities in healthcare are enormous. Our development team theorizes that we can create a medical device blending a traditional pediatric phototherapy irradiance meter for the treatment of neonatal jaundice with a mobile smartphone to create a reasonably priced irradiance meter with improved performance specifically for low-resource regions. The result of our work is a minimum viable prototype based on an Android operating system tethered wirelessly to a remote sensor that incorporates a clinical training feature. Based on laboratory tests simulating a clinical environment and field testing in Northern Nigeria, the results were equivalent to standard phototherapy meters with additional expected benefits of cost, mobility, access and clinical training.