Multi-sector Collaboration for Nutrition in Sri Lanka: Use of Mobile for Field Health Staff

District Nutrition Monitoring System of Sri Lanka is a platform developed to assist M&E activities of multi-sector action plan for nutrition, where data sharing occurs amongst stakeholders other than health, including agriculture, education, social services, fisheries/livestock etc.

The system consist of a data capture application which is a custom-made mobile application which is used by field health worker to register children with malnutrition, monitor nutrition related parameters (height/weight) regularly along with multisector risk factors which leads the child to malnutrition. The custom Android app supports offline data collection and analysis, multilingual support, real-time validation, display of WHO reference values for height/weight along with color coding to provide visual verification.(shown below).


In addition, the field health worker is able to visualize growth charts (weight for age, height for age and weight for height) which can help then in getting a snapshot idea on progress of nutrition (screenshot below).

The mobile app provides other analysis support such as nutrition problem analysis and standard deviation analysis based on weight/age, height/age etc.

The Android app communicates with the central DHIS2 based system using the web API. DNMS web app provides custom analytics for supervising staff and multisector managing staff. Custom analytics include growth charts, trend analysis of risk factors.

System is currently implemented in several districts of Sri Lanka for over 2 years.

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