In order to monitor the anti-polio campaign and record data from children on the drive, the Vehari DC Office has developed and tested an E-Polio Smartphone App.
The E-polios app created by Tauqir Ikram and sponsored by health experts, education and other fields, is an initiative of the Vehari administration. The study and execution of the project took less than two weeks and low costs.
Talking here, Vehari Deputy Commissioner Waqas Rasheed said that during the anti-polio campaign, health workers go door-to-door for coverage and mark walls of the houses manually, do finger markings and take notes to keep track of the vaccination status.
We come up with a smart solution, he added. “The solution is simple, cheap and digital. All we need is smart phones and an app to keep track of the reliable information”, he told. The DC said that we had launched the E-polio pilot project in Danewal, one urban union council (UC) of Vehari district, to ensure accurate implementation during the first polio campaign of 2020.
“We deputed 60 polio workers, who recorded names of all family members, ages of the children, home addresses and contacts, he informed. The smart phone App using GIS mapping technology makes it convenient to register and identify households, he continued. The technological surveillance approach allows quick, accurate and uptodate data monitoring to ensure 100 per cent coverage, he told.
The DC said that the data of 3,811 households and 6,214 children under the age of five had been recorded in the android App so far. Nearly 5,610 children received polio vaccine during the current campaign in the union council, he added.
