10 villages chosen as pilot areas for dengue app

TEN identified barangays in Davao City will become the pilot areas for the dengue-monitoring mobile application once the project is ready.

Kinasangan Foundation deputy executive director and Dengue Application senior business development consultant doctor Vincent Rey Vicente during the Connect media forum Friday, February 1, at SM Lanang Premier, said they now have the application ready for demonstration and will soon be piloted in the 10 identified dengue hotspot areas in the city.

City Health Office (CHO) head doctor Josephine Villafuerte confirmed that the hotspot areas are barangays Matina Crossing, Matina Aplaya, Maa, Buhangin, Calinan, Toril, Tibungco, 19-B, 8-A and 76-A.

“The app is under development and proposal stage but the thing is, lumabas yung app because it is very timely. And ever since I was in medical school, dengue is already a problem. Ang dami naming patients who succumb to dengue,” Vicente said.

“One of the best things to do to determine and control the problem is basically to identify where it starts so kailangan ng monitoring and tracking. Right now, we have mobile phones available to everyone,” he said, adding that since almost all has a mobile phone then it should be used as an advantage in addressing the dengue problem.

The health workers in the identified barangays will be trained how to use the mobile application and will be monitored by a team from the CHO.

Assigned health workers will have to update the mobile application with suspected or confirmed cases in the area they cover so that the CHO will be able to take action immediately.

Meanwhile, Vicente explained that in order to protect the project from hacking and preserve its confidentiality, the mobile application will be on a blockchain technology, a kind of technology that holds immutable data in a secure and encrypted way and ensure that transactions can never be altered.

“Once you have it in a blockchain technology, you know how secure the data are and it will be very difficult to hack. It is one of those things that we want na yung data na sina-submit is secure and confidential,” he said.