Tag Archives: m-Health
Scholarships available for Training course: Alternative Regulatory Strategies for Telecommunications
12 – 16 April 2010, Cape Town, SA
Health Officials now see the beauty of real-time biosurveillance
The Sivagangai District (Tamil Nadu, India) Deputy Director of Health Services (DDHS), Dr. Raghupathy, compared the Real-Time Biosurveillance Program (RTBP) to a comprehensive machine with multiple flavors that can give the required surveillance results with the touch of a button. Kurunegala RE (Region Epidemiologist, Sri Lanka), Dr. Hemachandra’s words were “RTBP will give a booster to surveillance in our region”.
Evaluation planning workshops took place in Karraikudi, Tamil Nadu and Kurunegala, Sri Lanka. This was to present the lessons to date and get a common consensus on the evaluation methodology. Participants were health officials and health workers (medical officers and nurses) belonging to the jurisdictions the project is being pilot tested. Besides the workshops, the researchers held meetings with health workers and officials to understand other elements towards evaluating the project.
Click to view the Indian Workshop report.
The medical officers in both countries agree that they cannot enter data while attending to 100 patients in a morning. The Real-Time Biosurveillance Program (RTBP) in India and Sri Lanka have, to date, collected 46,000+ and 76,000+ patient records since June 2009, respectively. This data comes from health facilities submitted through the m-HealthSurvey. Dr. M. Ganesan (Senior Project Officer, RTBI – ..read more
m-Health real-time biosurveillance pilot showcased in Las Vegas
Auton Lab is a technology partner developing the T-Cube software for the Real-Time Biosurveillance Program. Prof. Artur Dubrawski (Director of Carnegie Mellon Universities Auton Lab) presented the paper: TCube Web Interface for Real-time Biosurveillance in Sri Lanka at the Eight Annual International Society for Disease Surveillance (ISDS) 2009 in Las Vegas, USA, Dec 03-04. The presentation shows some examples of events detected by the T-Cube analysis on synthetic data set produced using the Sri Lanka Ministry of Health and Nutrition’s Epidemiology Unit published Weekly Epidemiological Report as a basis.
One of our Partners wins 2009 Infosys Prize
Prof. K. Vijayraghavan, Director of the National Center for Biological Sciences, in Bangalore is one of five recipients of this year’s Infosys Science Foundation prize, given to world-class researchers in social science in India. Along with our friends from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras’s – Rural Technology and Business Incubator, Prof. Vijayraghavan is one of the Investigators of the Real-Time Biosurveillance Program (RTBP) carried out in the state of Tamil Nadu in India and Sri Lanka. The m-Health RTBP is an action research aiming introduce mobile technologies for disease surveillance and notification.
Infosys Prize for five researchers, B.S. Satish Kumar, The Hindu –> FULL ARTICLE
“BANGALORE: The Infosys Science Foundation, a non-profit trust set up by Infosys Technologies, on Monday announced the Infosys Prize 2009 for five eminent researchers in four categories for their outstanding contributions to scientific research.
The winners are: Thanu Padmanabhan of the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune (Physical Sciences); Ashoke Sen of the Harish Chandra Research Institute, Allahabad (Mathematical Sciences); K. VijayRaghavan of the National Centre of Biological Sciences, Bangalore (Life Sciences); and Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology & ..read more
m-Health real-time biosurveillance at e-Asia2009
The health departments and health workers involved in the Real-Time Biosruveillance Program (RTBP) pilot see the benefits in the m-HealthSurvey for real-time data collection, TCube Web Interface for near-real-time outbreak detection, and Sahana Alerting Module for real-time health risk information dissemination. Preliminary lessons to date indicate the need for more robust mobile application for data collection with complete standardized content in disease-syndrome for reduction of noise and increase of reliability in the datasets. More rigorous capacity building and frequent use is required for health officials to take advantage of the full potential of TCWI. Further exercises need to be carried out with the Sahana Alerting Module to understand its shortcomings. Given that the system has been in preliminary use for less than six months, it is anticipated that the usability issues will subside in time to come.
These concluding remarks are from the paper titled- “Real-TIme Biosurveillance Pilot in India and Sri Lanka“, which I shall be presenting at the e-Asia 2009 Conference to be held December 02 – 04, 2009 in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
For the Slides Click Here
Evaluation Guide for Real-Time Biosurveillance Program
The objective of this document: Guidelines for Evaluating RTBP v0.4 is to outline the evaluation methodology for assessing the upstream communication: data collection, data processing: event detection, and downstream communication: alerting/reporting stages (verticals in Figure 1) on the aspects of social, content, application, and technology of a RealTime Biosurveillance Program (RTBP). The blue arrows across the verticals and the horizontals indicate the interoperability between elements.
Young Health Workers more likely to adopt the m-HealthSurvey
A m-HealthSurvey Certification Exercise was carried out as part of the m-Health Real-Time Biosurveillance Program (RTBP) to measure the usability and adoptability of the m-HealthSurvey mobile application. The exercise was conducted with health workers in Sivagangai District, Tamil Nadu, India and in Kurunegala District, Sri Lanka. The final results of the exercise will be published in the near future.
m-HealthSurvey is a mobile application developed by indian Institute of technology Madras’s Rural Technology and Business Incubator (RTBI) for collecting near real-time patient disease, syndrome, and demographic data for rapid detection of disease outbreaks. It is a J2ME midlet that allows users to select categorical data as well as type information to generate patient clinical records to be submitted via GPRS to a central database. The pilot is going on in India and Sri Lanka now.
Observations from the exercise revealed a disparity in the usage and adoption between the age groups of the health workers using the m-HealthSurvey for RTBP data submission – younger Sarvodaya Suwadana Center health workers, between the age of 18 – 35 in Sri Lanka, were able to complete the exercise easily in the allotted time by themselves without any help. While the ..read more
Mobile phone key pad inefficient for high volume health data entry
m-Health Real-Time Biosurveillance Program (RTBP) interviewed Medical Officers in Kurunegal District in Sri Lanka and Sivagangai District in Tamil Nadu, India, during the months of September and October, 2009. These interactions revealed that outpatient health record entry in real-time by Medical Officers, using the mobile phone key pad is inefficient and the idea was rejected by them. The aim of the RTBP is to collect digitized patient disease, syndrome, and demographic information from the point of care to rapidly detect disease outbreaks.
Village Health Nurses in Tamil Nadu examine at most 70 patients a week. Ninety percent of the Village Health Nurses opt to jot down the records on paper and later enter them leisurely after the day’s work is complete. Therefore, they can easily use a mobile phone for data entry. However, the same solution cannot be applied to Primary Health Centers (Clinics) or Hospitals because they cater to as much as 200 patients a day within a span of 5 hours (8am – 1pm), giving the Medical Officers just about 90 seconds to examine each patient. Although the m-HealthSurvey mobile application offers the users to mostly select data opposed to typing, some editing of symptoms ..read more
Health Workers express difficulties in m-HealthSurvey
The main problem, identified by India and Sri Lanka health workers, with the Rural technology and Business Incubator (RTBI) developed m-HealthSurvey mobile application, was in the look up content. The application allows for the user to search for a disease name by typing a few characters of the name. Upon selection predefined symptoms and signs are auto-displayed, giving the user the option to edit those values, if needed. The Health Workers using the application to send patient case information, expressed the need for full list of all possible symptoms and signs, associated with each disease; then all they have to do is delete and not enter. Entering is cumbersome for those user; especially in Sri Lanka, who are not familiar with the spelling of symptom and signs. Hence, some sort of a dictionary function or word prediction function has to be incorporated to make it easy.
The Health Workers collecting data in Sri Lanka are trained youth, in primary healthcare, belonging to the Sarvodaya Shanthi Sena Movement. Before the project they had not known each other. Now they have formed a social network to SMS each other of any health related issues or other. The same was not ..read more
Real-Time Biosurveillance Program Software Requirement Specifications
The Real-Time Biosurveillance Program (RTBP) information communication system comprises an upstream health data submission by last-mile health workers, data processing by epidemiologist, and downstream alerting by health officials.There are four components to the RTBP software: mobile phone application, desktop web application, database, T-Cube analytic tools, and Common Alerting Protocol messaging. The individual components are to be developed by Rural Technology and Business Incubator, Respere (Private) Limited, and Auton Lab. Following are the four software requirement specification documents -
1) Sahana biosurveillance module (database and desktop web application)
2) Mobile J2ME application (data collection)
3) T-Cube web interface (analysis and event detection)
4) Sahana Common Alerting Protocol Messaging Module (publishing SMS/Email/Web alerts)
Health Workers fear m-Health may reveal accountability secrets
Village Health Nurses (VHN) are the last-mile health workers attending to the primary health care needs of the rural villagers in the state of Tamil Nadu; where the real-time biosruveillance program (RTBP) is being pilot tested in India. They work under harsh conditions. For instance transportation schedule is limited to a bus that leaves in the morning and returns in the afternoon. Baking and sweating in the hot sun in Sivaganga District of Tamil Nadu, they walk for several kilometers, carrying a heavy load of Registers, making house calls to give the much needed health care to the rural poor.
During a recent workshop, in Tamil Nadu, a discussion around the accountability of submitting data revealed that the VHN sometimes cheat on the statistics they tediously record on large volumes of paper forms. At times if a certain disease count, during a given visitation to a village is, let’s say 6, they may record 2. This is to avoid additional work imposed on them by the Deputy Director of Health Service office. If the count is above a certain threshold, let’s say 4, then they must immediately notify the Sector Health Nurse (SHN) resident at ..read more
RTBP workshop on detecting events in m-Health data
After showcasing our work at ICTD2009 (see poster), where our work: real-time biosurveillance program (RTBP) was highlighted along with Bill Gates in a Qatar media article, Prof. Artur Dubrawski (Director Auton Lab) and I returned to Sri Lanka to engage in work related to our pilot project: RTBP. Prof. Dubrawski’s visit included a workshop on T-Cube web interface in support ot the RTBP for the RTBP researchers at Sarvodaya head quarters in Moratuwa (see workshop program), a colloquium on Machine Learning in Support of Biomedical Security for the faculty and students at the University of Colombo School of Computing, and participating in the health worker m-HealthSurvey training program in Kuliyapitiya. The work under taken, April 21 – 25, is elaborated in the trip report.
Suwadana Center Volunteers ready to use RTBP’s m-HealthSurvey
Sixteen Sarovdaya Suwadana Center Volunteers working in the capacity of Research Assistants for the real-time biosurveillance program were trained in the use of the m-HealthSurvey mobile application. The training took place at the Sarvodaya Kuliyapitiya District Center, April 23 – 25, 2009. The three day program comprised lectures on disease surveillance and notification, use of mobile application for communicating patient data, and a field visit to understand the working environment. The Suwadana Center Volunteer training workshop report carries the full story.
Putting T-Cube to the test
“Leptospirosis is out and Dengue is in” – these are the words of the Sarvodaya Research Assistant – Pubudini weerakoon – working in Kurunegala District of Sri Lanka on the real-time biosurveillance program (RTBP). This report on Leptospirosis in Sri Lanka gives a full account of the past events.
The aim of the RTBP is to gather patient case information through the m-Healthsurvey mobile application and subject that data to real time analysis for rapid detection of emerging health events. The automated analytic and detection is driven by the T-Cube software, developed by Carnegie Mellon Universities Auton Lab, based on data mining principles. We took the weekly epidemiological reports (WER) from the past two years and put T-Cube to the test. The graphic shows T-Cube’s spatial scan snapshot of Leptospirosis outbreak and spread being detected in October 2008. However, the Sri Lankan health officials identified the outbreak and anounced it in December of 2008.
Now the Public Health Officials are hammered with a Dengue outbreak. The news paper clipping reads “5 deaths in Kurunegala”, which is the district RTBP pilot is being carried out. Dengue does emerge time to time in small dozes ..read more
ICTD2009 highlights RTBP m-Health
Press Release 2009 from Brown Lloyd James.
ICTD2009 highlights new developments in technology for developing countries
“Dr. Artur Dubrawski, Director of the AutonLab at Carnegie Mellon University and Mr. Nuwan Waidyanatha, Senior Researcher and Project Director of LIRNEasia in Sri Lanka, are presenting their collaborative project using mobile telephony. The project uses the T-Cube Web Interface, a tool developed by Carnegie Mellon University to visualize and manipulate large scale multivariate time series datasets, to support real-time bio-surveillance. “Health workers in the field will input patient and symptom data into a form on their mobile phones, which will immediately update a central database. The database will be available to central health organizations, and is designed to support rapid detection and mitigation of bio-medical threats in developing countries by improving the response time to analyzing the data.” The program is currently in pilot in Sri Lanka and India. “We see many different applications for this type of program across other areas,” comments Dr. Dubrawaki. “We look forward to meeting the other delegates at the conference and presenting our program, with the intention to expand our own project to other fields as well as to learn about their technologies”.
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