Hussain, Akbar
Al-jumaili, Saif
Tahir, Faiza
Cheema, Sehrish Munawar
Malik, Eshmal
Anwar, Amna
Branco, Frederico
Pires, Ivan Miguel
Funding for this research was provided by:
Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (UID/50014/2025)
Article History
Received: 10 March 2026
Accepted: 12 June 2026
First Online: 20 June 2026
Declarations
:
: The authors declare no competing interests.
: This study used a publicly available secondary dataset and did not involve direct interaction with human participants, prospective patient recruitment, clinical intervention, or access to identifiable private health records. Therefore, formal institutional review board approval was not required for the present secondary-data analysis. The mobile application prototype was evaluated only as a technical and educational demonstration and was not deployed for clinical diagnosis, treatment recommendation, or real-world clinical decision-making. Although the present work did not process identifiable patient information, ethical and privacy considerations remain important for any future deployment of the proposed system. User-entered symptoms may represent sensitive health-related information, and their collection, storage, transmission, and analysis would require appropriate safeguards. Therefore, future real-world implementation should obtain ethical approval where required, obtain informed consent, and ensure compliance with relevant health data privacy and data protection regulations. Future versions of the system should also incorporate secure storage, encrypted communication, access-control mechanisms, audit logging, and privacy-preserving data handling. In addition, the system should clearly inform users that its outputs are intended for decision support only and should not replace professional medical consultation. Clinician oversight, guideline alignment, and safety validation would be required before the system could be considered for use in healthcare environments.
: Not applicable for the current secondary data analysis because no human participants were recruited and no identifiable private clinical records were used.