Inclusive Mobile Health System for Yoruba Race in Nigeria

Language differences are major barrier to the dissemination of information between patients and health workers in the Southwestern part of Nigeria. Developing a system that would assist an individual to explain their health issues in their preferred language using mobile devices is a spot for concern to effective communication. This idea will promote and achieve good health for all which is the NO 3 of the seventeen sustainable development goals (SDGs) adopted by the general assembly of the United Nations. The authors have developed an inclusive mobile health application that would translate English text to Yoruba text using a direct rule-based machine translation approach. Production rules based on English sentence structure were formulated using context-free grammar and a dictionary data set containing English words and their Yoruba language equivalent was also adopted. The system development was achieved with Java programming, Extensible Markup language (XML), and Mongo DB. The new system (RTCHAT) was developed and its translation result was compared with Google Translate. One hundred (100) translated sentences used in the new application (RTCHAT) were extracted and given to Yoruba linguistics to identify correctly, partially, and wrongly translated sentences. The result was compared with google translate of the same group of sentences and the result shows that eleven (11) sentences were correctly translated in Google translate and eighty-nine (89) in RTCHAT, ten (10) were partially translated in RTCHAT and thirteen (13) in Google translate and finally, seventy-two (72) sentences were wrongly translated in Google and three (3) in RTCHAT. Performance of the new system (RTCHAT) was tested at Rufus Giwa Polytechnic (Nigeria) community and the result shows a high percentage of performance and ratability.