Activity and school attendance monitoring system for adolescents with sickle cell disease.

Sickle cell disease, the most common hemoglobin disorder, affects major organ systems with symptoms of pain, anemia and a multitude of chronic conditions. For adolescents, the disease adversely affects school attendance, academic progress and social activity. To effectively study the relationship among school attendance and other factors like demographics and academic performance, studies have relied on self-reporting and school records, all of which have some bias. In this study we design and prototype a system, called SickleSAM (Sickle cell School attendance and Activity Monitoring system), for automatically monitoring school attendance and daily activity of adolescents with sickle cell disease. SickleSAM intends to remove human bias and inaccuracies. The system uses built-in GPS to collect data which will be recorded into a cloud database using Short Messaging Service technology. SickleSAM is developed by Georgia Institute of Technology in conjunction with Children's Healthcare of Atlanta (CHOA). System effectiveness is being evaluated using a trial of 10 adolescents with the disease.