M-health tools utilization of tele-home healthcare services for diabetes management among youth in Kigali City

Abstract

Background: Self-care of diabetes for youth requires a daily self-active participation, which is complex and demanding. Effective patient engagement through technology tools may bring about compliance to healthcare 24 hours/ 7 days which minimises the diabetes complications and clinicians overload.

Objective: This study aimed to assess M-health tools utilization of tele-home healthcare services for diabetes management among youth in Kigali City.

Method: This cross-sectional study was conducted among the Rwanda Diabetes Association members. The study populations were youth diabetic patients residing in Kigali city. With simple random sampling, self-administered questionnaire was used to collect data for 122 participants. The raw data was entered into the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS: 20) to perform descriptive and inferential statistics in data analysis.

Results: The mobile telephone is highly used in healthcare by participants (≥80%) with its functions such as Short Message Services, and the voice call is more useful (≥87%). Furthermore, occupation and education level of diabetic youth do not have significance influence (p=0.825 and p=0.751) over the use of a mobile telephone in healthcare. Radios and televisions are mostly used in healthcare education (93.5%).

Conclusions: Tele-home healthcare is practised in Rwanda but dominated by store and forward system. Mobile telephone, radio and television are mostly used whereas emails and social media are slowly used.

Keywords: m-health, Tele-home, Healthcare service, and youth