Abstract
The critical period for growth and development is during childhood and adolescence. In Thailand, the number of children 0-5 years with delayed development is an important issue tracked annually by the Ministry of Public Health. If appropriate health promotion is provided during this critical period, children will grow up to be happy adults, able to realize their full potential, and become strong contributors to society. Health care providers, parents, and teachers all have important roles in providing health care supervision. Notably, amongst these three groups, parents spend the most time with their children. If parents are equipped with information on how to support and promote healthy physical, mental, emotional, and behavioral development, they can track their children’s development and detect problems earlier. Since 2013, we have set on a mission to research and development a mobile and web application called KhunLook that serves this purpose with funding from the Healthcare Systems Research Institute (HSRI) and the National Research Council of Thailand (NRCT). KhunLook provides up-to-date information and healthcare assessments based on standard best practice and clinical guidelines in an easy-to-use and convenient mobile and web application. More than 500,000 people have downloaded the mobile application on iOS and Android operating systems, and more than 3,000 people have registered and used the web application www.khunlook.com. The KhunLook mobile application’s key strength when released was its ability to work completely offline, disconnected from the Internet, which was required in 2013 because the majority of users at that time could not afford Internet access on their mobile phones. Today, Thailand is amongst the top countries in the world with mobile Internet access. Therefore, in this project, we have updated the KhunLook mobile application to be an online application that can work in both online and offline mode. With users’ consent, we store user data on the KhunLook Platform and use that data to provide healthcare data analytics. After the first six months of deployment, we have access to more than a million healthcare-related records that can be used for healthcare data analytics, such as data on development, growth, vaccination, and oral health. If KhunLook were to be promoted widely, there could be a large amount of data comparable to the data collected by the Ministry of Public Health to track their KPI’s, leading to valuable data-driven insights that could influence health care policy. Furthermore, the granularity of data in the KhunLook platform is more fine-grained than data tracked by healthcare service providers, so there is potential to leverage KhunLook data to perform in-depth health assessment of individuals. Lastly, the KhunLook platform can be used to broaden the reach of healthcare innovations by adding such innovations into the mobile application. We have conducted a pilot study to leverage the KhunLook platform to support parents of children with delayed development by providing them access to the Department of Mental Health’s Thai Early Developmental Assessment for Intervention (TEDA4I). Parents can use the KhunLook mobile application to stimulate and track their children’s development. As future work, other innovative assessments may be added, and their usage may be tracked through the KhunLook platform.
