The village Health Nurse (VHN) is a rural last mile primary health care worker – duties ranging from holding medical camps in schools to running a Health Service Center (HSC) in the village providing primary health care to walking door-to-door providing antenatal and post natal care. These mobile services require proper documentation; the paper work is later converted to statistics that is reviewed by the district and state Health Officials. An idea Sir Gee is to replace the 2 heavy bags with a 100gram mobile phone with built in applets to capture the same data. The Real Time Biosurveillance Program, an m-Health pilot carried out by Indian Institute of Technology Madras’s Rural Technology and Business Incubator in the Thirupathur block, to begin with, will be field testing the mobile concept of capturing the necessary and sufficient morbidity data for aggregate reports and disease surveillance. Lessons from this pilot will provide enough insight to develop the remaining applets to replace the heavy bags.
As a trial the State of Tamil Nadu, in India, is piloting the use of mobile phones with Village Health Nurses (VHN) to talk with the Deputy Director of Health Service (DDHS) and Public Health Center (PHC) staff as and when they need. Indian Institute of Technology in Madras (IITM) will add on a m-Health Survey application to add value to the mobile phones for the VHN to share patient disease and syndrome information. Besides digitizing health records, the VHN are eager to learn other communcation features such as SMS, WWW (GPRS), and Email. Team of Researchers from IITM’s Rural Technology and Buisness Incubator (RTBI) visited with the Thirupathur Block VHNs to outline the Real-Time Biosurveillance Program, a pilot project carried out in India and Sri Lanka. The meeting is documented in the “IITM VHN meeting report“.
Several of the pilot projects presented at the 2nd Pan Asian evidence-based e-Health adoptation and application (in short form – Panacea), were m-Health projects. One of the Panacea projects THIRRA and LIRNEasia lead RTBP share some aspects one being working on disease information communication in Sri Lanka; however, differs in the goals where THIRRA aims to digitize the H-544 health form at the Public Health Inspector’s point of service – at the patient’s home. On the other hand, RTBP will digitize minimal set of parameters: location (postal code), disease (ICD Code), symptom, sign, age, and gender collected from health provider facilities. Some of the other m-Health projects; especially in Philippines, involved Filipino rural community health care workers strictly using SMS with prearranged formatted strings for communicating field data to a central database. Prof.
The design of the Real-Time Biosurveillance Program pilot (termed as the m-Health project) and findings from the Last-Mile Hazard Information Dissemination pilot (termed as the HazInfo projects) involvoing the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) were presented, yesterday, at the CAP Implementers Workshop organized by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). First Talk – The m-Health RTBP will be evaluating CAP or EDXL (Emergency Data Exchange Language) as means for disseminating health risk information to local health officials and community health care workers. Currently, the National Epidemiology Unit, in Sri Lanka, publishes a “Weekly Epidemiological Report” on the world wide web, a pdf file that can only be viewed on a personal computer. Paper copies of the same are delivered via postal mail to the relevant health officials. The latency in gathering the epidemiological data, analyzing, publishing, and disseminating is delayed as much as up to 3 weeks.
I was invited by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU-D) to present and overview of the Common Alerting Protocol and lessons learned in the Sri Lankan experience in relations to the HazInfo project and the work in progress on the RTBP m-Health project. Further demonstrated the use of the Sahana Messaging Moudule CAP Template engine for generating CAP messages and the SMS/Email Multicasting engine for issuing alerts. Dialog Telekom is the only Sri Lankan organization that has adopted CAP and has embedded CAP in to their Disaster and Emergency Warning Network (DEWN) for communicating disasters. The DEWN solution in being implemented as means for the Disaster Management Center of Sri Lanka to communicate hazard information to their District level disaster centers and local first responders. CAP surfaced as a standard in 2005 fairly new and unheard of by most in the disaster communication arena in the developing world.
The Sarvodaya Suwadana Center Volunteers (Community Healthcare Workers) assembled at the Medical Officer of Health office in Kuliyapitya (Kurunegala District, Sri Lanka). This was a workshop organized by Sarvodaya and LIRNEasia as part of the Real-Time Biosurveillance Program (RTBP), launched in July this year – evidence based healthcare research aiming to evaluate the use of mobile phones for collecting health data and applying statistical data mining software programs for detecting emerging diseases outbreaks. This initiative is to complement the existing national disease surveillance and notification system.
This past week, our friends from the Rural Technology and Business Incubator (RTBI) of the Indian Institute of Technology showcased the Real-Time Biosurveillance Program (RTBP) at the Connect 2008 exhibition hosted in Chennai, India from September 11-13. The theme of this year’s event, which is the 8th episode, is – Global Competitiveness and Equitable Growth-Driven by Innovation”. The action research: Evaluating a real-time Biosurveillance program, being pilot tested in the state of Tamil Nadu, India and the District of Kurunegala, Sri Lanka over the next 2 years to come is an innovation emphasizing m-Health. The two ladies: Geetha G (left) and Suma Prashanth (right) in the news articel are managing the RTBP project in India, which includes developing the technology and piloting the ICT system with Village Health Nurses in rural Tamil Nadu. At present, the technology partners RTBI, Auton Lab (USA), and Lanka Software Foundation (Sri Lanka) are jointly working on developing the end-to-end disease surveillance and notification software applications.
A series of four meetings were held between 03-Aug-08 to 05-Aug-08 at the Indian Institute of Technology – Madras campus on defining the project design and goals in relation to the real-time biosurveillance program pilot. The program brought together partners from North America (University of Alberta and Carnegie Mellon University) who joined the meeting through skype; while the Indian and Sri Lankan partners met, face-to-face, at IIT-M’s Rural Technology and Business Incubator. The meeting coined this operations research initiative to be a “unique project”. You can access the RTBP partner meeting report v1 Set of presentations Disease surveillance program in Sri Lanka Mobile phones for public health intervention Auton Lab algorithms and data structures for rapid detection Sahana health and messaging modules Mobiles for data entry Sarvodaya community health program RTBP work plan
The real-time biosurveillance program is a pilot on the broader concepts of mobile health data surveillance for unusual patterns. Mobile Health is best defined by Krishnan Ganapathy’s exclusive published on Mobileactive. A partner meeting will take place at the Indian Institute of Technology Rural Technology and Business Incubator on Monday (04-Aug-2008) to discuss the way forward on the multi partner m-Health project. This initial meeting follows the e-India event on e-Health in Delhi where stakeholders are coming together to discuss lessons on similar action research. The partner planning meet program will bring together the project partners and give everyone the opportunity to hear each other out in relations to their roles and responsibilities.
Bangladesh is a country that is constantly hammered by cyclones and other severe weather hazards. While Cyclone Nargis threatened to hit Bangladesh but deviated from its original path devastated Myanmar instead. However, it was not the same with Cyclone Sidr, in September of 2007. Policy makers, practitioners, and researchers, in Bangladesh, are focusing on satellite technology to reduce the risks associated with natural hazards. It is logical to use satellite technology because during a cyclone terrestrial infrastructure is bound to be destroyed by the powerful natural forces; where the satellite technologies will remain functional.
Remember in Star Trek Dr. Leonard McCoy, nicknamed Bones, would use a handheld device (shaped like a mobile phone) to scan the vital signs report of a patient; the little screen on the device would make some electronic noises and display some random illuminated pixels, which he would interpret to diagnose the condition of the patient; thereafter, he would use the same device or the wrist device to call “Sick Bay” tell them what to do with patient diagnosed outside of the facility. He would even transfer the diagnostic report to Sick-Bay for the on duty staff to pickup to get ready before the patient arrived. A team of researchers at the University of California, Berkley are using mobile phones that display faint blue dots on the screen received through a text message to diagnose signatures of Malaria. The Science and Technology article of the Economists tells the story about Dr.
This article summarizes the series of event leading up to the impact, the events during the devastation, and other noteworthy information pertaining to cyclone Nargis’ encounter in Myanmar (Burma). Before the impact 26-04-2008: The early signs of Nargis developing in the Bay of Bengal were detected by the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) and the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC). “Way back on April 26, we told them a cyclone was coming,” B. P. Yadav said, referring to general warnings of a growing storm.
“Scientists have long believed tsunamis form from vertical deformation of seafloor during undersea earthquakes. However, seismograph and GPS data show such deformation from the 2004 Sumatra earthquake was too small to generate the powerful tsunami that ensued. Song’s team found horizontal forces were responsible for two-thirds of the tsunami’s height, as observed by three satellites (NASA’s Jason, the U.S. Navy’s Geosat Follow-on and the European Space Agency’s Environmental Satellite), and generated five times more energy than the earthquake’s vertical displacements.
The Wireless Personal Multimedia Communications (WPMC2007) symposium was held in Jaipur, India, December 03 – 06, 2007. The paper by N. Waidyanatha, S. Rangarajan, G. Gow, and P.
National Disaster Management Guidelines Released “We all know that India like any other nation in the world has its own share of vulnerability, risk and its capacity to respond to the disasters. The equations of these three factors can be well visualized in some of the worst disasters of the past – the Super Cyclone in Orissa in October 1999, the Bhuj earthquake in January and Tsunami in December 2004. All these revealed the mass casualty potential of natural disasters. ” “The underlying message is whether it is natural or manmade, these disasters have the potential of causing mass casualties and we need to address these issues squarely. We need to adopt multi-disciplinary and multi-sectoral approach for prevention/mitigation strategies so as to develop capacities to improve response.
Paper titled: Challenges of Optimizing Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) for SMS based GSM Devices in Last-Mile Hazard Warnings in Sri Lanka (authors N. Waidyanatha – LIRNEasia, D. Dias – University of Moratuwa, and H. Purasinghe – Microimage) was presented at the 19th Meeting of the Wireless World Research Forum (WWRF), in Chennai, India, 5-7 November, 2007. The paper was discussed in Working Group 1 – Human Perspective and Service Concepts (WG1).