Raising Awareness in the Adoption of COVID-19 Preventive Measures in Higher Education Students through an Epidemiological Surveillance Mobile App

COVID-19 disease has started several levels of alert and biosafety protocols to mitigate the risk of contagion everywhere, therefore causing universities to adopt the virtual environments in their teachings, but nowadays it became a necessity to return to classrooms in a short term basis; however, how prepared are we for this “new normal”? In this research, a validated questionnaire was used to measure the knowledge of COVID-19 and preventive measures adopted by university students, before and after the use of an epidemiological surveillance mobile app, developed as a tool to raise awareness in students. The research was quantitative, quasi-experimental, it was applied in a sample of 82 students, the analysis was global and gender inferential using the non-parametric T test for paired samples. The results indicated that the epidemiological surveillance mobile app made possible to raise awareness in the students in the adoption of preventive measures, proposing awareness strategies that allow establishing alerts and timely controls.