CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1       Background to the Study

Information and Communication Technology (ICT), specifically mobile health (mHealth), can play a key role in enhancing and enabling health care systems, when linked to specific needs. The initiation of various types of mobile portable computer devices – smartphones, private digitally powered assistants, and tablet systems has influenced an appreciated positive impact in many works of life which includes the health sector. This has been influenced by the increasing excellence and availability of application software in the health sector, (Aungst, 2013).  These softwares are set of instructions that have been written in a particular programming language to run on a moveable portable aid or on a computer system to achieve a particular purpose, (Wallace, Clark & White, 2012). In recent development faster processors and improved memory in the analysis of complex data in the health sector have paved the way for diverse medical mobile expert systems. These systems are either individualised or used by medical expert (Ozdalga, Ozdalga & Ahuja, 2012). These portable application systems are designed to supplement the experts work in order to deliver a resource that will advance the results for private health monitoring and at the point of care (Aungst, 2013).  There are existing medical expert system models and health calculators which include Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium (BCSC) Risk Calculator (for breast cancer risk calculation), the Breast Cancer Risk Assessment Tool (the Gail model) often used by health care providers to estimate risk, MedCalc. These models did not explore detail risk factors for breast cancer growth, and detail fuzzy rules were not explored as well. Most of the mobile health calculators for breast cancer prognosis are not user friendly. They are not readily available for personal use and are majorly used by the medical professionals in the the health care sectors.

World Health Organisation (WHO) in 2012 described cancer as a leading cause global deaths. In, 2008 cancer accounted for about 13% (7.6 million) deaths (WHO, 2017). There are divergent views on the exact cause of breast cancer. Though, knowing an individual risk factors and preventing the growth of the malignant (breast cancer) could be a preferred approach to tackling this disease because most research works that have developed models for prognosis and diagnosis have not actually reduced the death rate (Global Cancer Facts & Figures, 2015). This is because reviewed literatures have shown that the existing systems focused on diagnosing/prognosing the survivability and recurrence of the disease. By the time patients report at the hospital for diagnosis, the tumour has grown to the metastatic stage where survival is almost impossible.

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