On the eve of Nuwan Waidyanatha’s big dissemination event in Colombo, it was nice to see very high profile coverage for his work in one of India’s leading newspapers, the Hindu: The detection of spread of respiratory tract infection in conjunction with a viral fever in Sri Lanka that caught the attention of the health departments and escalating diarrhoea cases in Tamil Nadu were detected in a matter of a day after the onset of the outbreaks. Through alert systems in the pilot project, such situations were communicated to the local community and health departments, who then publicised preventive measures and treatment. Potentially, the RTBP reduces the time to identify a potential disease outbreak to just a day.
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.
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.