A mobile e-Health software project for remote monitoring of children enrolled in the Carolina Curriculum.

The Carolina Curriculum for Infants and Toddlers with Special Needs (CCITSN) is a well established assessment curriculum-based for early intervention programs, where sequenced items data collection and analysis allow for monitoring, incremental program change, and recognition of areas of relative strength and weakness in children with mild, moderate, or severe disabilities. Unfortunately, this protocol, and the support developed software C@rolin@ is concerned only with the medical aspects, which are basically recorded with a huge gap of time intervals. Moreover, due to lack of funding in local health care facilities, the medical staff is not able to care adequately the involved children that, as provided by this program, must perform most of the assessment activities in their own homes, supported by parents that often are left alone during the period between two medical visit. In order to reduce the gap between families and medical staff, this paper describes the design and development of CarolApp, a mobile framework that allows, from one side, parents of enrolled children in the Carolina Curriculum to capture situations by using collected photos and videos relating to the behaviors of their children during the assessment period at home and to send these to the ad-hoc social network by means of their mobile devices, and from the others side, medical staff to care adequately the patients in a "remote-way", analyzing and providing certified feedback, answers and if needed request an additional visit, by following the progress of these children thanks to the received multimedia objects.