Johns Hopkins International Injury Research Unit Receives New Grant from Fogarty – NIH for Child Injury Prevention in Malaysia

Recently, the Johns Hopkins International Injury Research Unit (JH-IIRU) was awarded a grant from the Fogarty International Center of the National Institute of Health’s Mobile Health: Technology and Outcomes in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (mHealth) program which is designed to support the development of using mobile devices and apps to focus on a range of public health issues, including non-communicable diseases and injury prevention, as well as to help improve training for community health workers.

The JH-IIRU team, which includes associate director Abdulgafoor Bachani and director Adnan Hyder, will work with the Institute for Public Health in Malaysia (IKU) on reducing child injuries at home by creating a mobile phone-based app (MAP-CHILD) designed to assess household injury risks to Malaysian children under five.  After the app is evaluated, it will be modified into a preventative tool that can be used in other low- and middle-income (LMIC) settings. Working in partnership with IKU, JH-IIRU also plans to develop a core group of researchers focused on the use and integration of mHealth for research and training.

Using mobile communication technology and software applications to conduct research around a nationally relevant issue is a novel application of mHealth approaches to a national injury prevention priority. The JH-IIRU team envisions that this program will lead to the future development of a program dedicated to the use of mHealth in global health injury research and training worldwide. JH-IIRU is going to collaborate with the Johns Hopkins University Global mHealth initiative on this project.

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