A public lecture entitled, “From euphoria to pragmatism: The experience and the potentials of eHealth in Asia” is to be held at the Sri Lanka Medical Association, Colombo 7, on 14 September 2010 from 1500Hrs to 1730Hrs. The new paradigm, called eHealth, is being adapted widely, from primary to tertiary health care in many countries. However, looking at the current literature on the subject, the reviews have been mixed. For every successful and sustainable initiative that has been adopted several have fallen on the wayside. This lecture will look into the experiences of eHealth in Asia.
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.
Dr. Gordon Gow presented the working paper titled; The future of community-based hazard information systems: Insights from the Internet sharing economy. Dr. Gow who was previously at the LSE is now an Associate Professor at University of Alberta. The presentation began by looking at situations where systems/programmes are developed but only to fall to disuse.
Exactly seven years from yesterday (still today to some), early in the morning on September 11, 2001, nineteen hijackers took control of four commercial airliners en route to San Francisco and Los Angeles from Boston, Newark, and Washington, D.C. The hijackers flew two of the airliners, American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, into the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center. Another group of hijackers flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon. A fourth flight, United Airlines Flight 93, whose ultimate target was either the United States Capitol or White House, crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
Gordon Gow, a lead researcher in the Last-Mile Hazard Warning System (LM-HWS) Pilot (HazInfo project), presented the paper titled – “Community-based Hazard Warnings in Sri Lanka: Performance of Alerting and Notification in a Last-Mile Message Relay” at the 1st Wireless Rural and Emergency Communications (WRECOM) Conference in Rome, Italy, Oct 01-02. One of Gordon Gow’s key contributions to the HazInfo project was the Common Alerting Protocol Profile for Sri Lanka, which was a hard case as far as integrating the multi-language scenario as it is the case in Sri Lanka. The CAP Profile for Sri Lanka was designed for disseminations in Sinhala, Tamil, and English languages. Such a complex profile of CAP was field tested in Sri Lanka’s HazInfo project. This was the first time a Multilanguage profile was field tested in the World.
The HazInfo paper titled “Last-Mile Hazard Warning in Sri Lanka: Performance of WorldSpace Satellite Radios for Emergency Alerts”, coauthored by Srinivasan Rangarajan, PhD (Senior Vice President Engineering, WorldSpace), Peter Anderson (Associate Professor, Simon Fraser University), Gordon Gow, PhD (Assistant Professor, University of Alberta), and Nuwan Waidyanatha (Project Manager, LIRNEasia) was accepted for oral/poster presentation at the Wireless Personal Multimedia Communications (WPMC) at The Birla Science and Technology Center in the heart of Jaipur, India, December 03 – 06, 2007. WorldSpace, a lead technology partner in the HazInfo research project, field tested 16 Addressable Radios for Emergency Alerts (AREAs) in the Sarvodaya Communities and 34 AREAs in the Sarvodaya District Centers. Although the AREA solutions lacked bi-directional communication and seemed the least effective, the AREA solution proved to be the most reliable that worked with utmost certainty and greatest efficiency even when GSM and CDMA cells were deactivated for over 2 months, at the beginning of this year, during military operations in the conflict prone North-East regions of Sri Lanka. The HazInfo research introduced a concept called “complementary redundancy”, where coupling the AREA addressable/broadcast technology with a GSM mobile phone or CDMA nomadic phone improves the overall performance (reliability and effectiveness) […]
Paper titled “Community-based Hazard Warnings in Rural Sri Lanka: Performance of a Last-Mile Message Relay”, authors – Gordon Gow (Associate Professor, Faculty of Extensions, University of Alberta, Canada), Peter Anderson (Associate Professor, Department of Telematics, Simon Fraser University, Canada), and Nuwan Waidyanatha (Project Manager, Last-Mile Hazard Warning Systems, LIRNEasia, Sri Lanka), will be presented at the 1st Wireless Rural Emergency Communication Conference. The WRECOM 2007 Conference is jointly organized by the University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, the IEEE Communications Society and the Vehicular Technology/Communications Society joint Chapter Italy Section. The conference will take place in Rome, October 1-2, 2007. The HazInfo project realized that early warnings via Information Communication Technology (ICT) must be a point-to-multi-point application and is best accommodate by Wireless ICTs. The HazInfo pilot included outfitting and field-testing an initial 32 villages with various combinations of wireless communication equipment, which could provide features such as: early warning wake-up, addressability and provision of information in three languages (English, Sinhalese and Tamil).
Assume a scenario where among the chief complaint strings of two unrelated patients in the same District on the same date there was a mention of bloody stools in pediatric cases. The multiple mentions of “bloody stools” or “pediatric” might not be surprising, but the tying together of these two factors, given matching geographic locations and timings of reporting, is sufficiently rare that seeing only two such cases is of interest. This was precisely the evidence that was the first noticeable signal of the tragic Walkerton, Canada, waterborne bacterial gastroenteritis outbreak caused by contamination of tap water in May 2000. That weak signal was spotted by an astute physician, not by a surveillance system. Reliable automated detection of such signals in multivariate data requires new analytic approaches.
Often a response is a result of a stimulus. Evacuation drills are stimulus-response models; the drill is activated by a siren and the people are expected to react by hurrying to safety zones, in most cases defined by the community’s response plan; i.e. activating an existing emergency response plan.Social Cognition is encoding, storing, and retrieving social information and applying the cognition to social situations.
Nandan Jayasinghe — We will start the event by lighting the traditional oil lamp. Next is a 2 minute meditation. Nuwan Waidyanatha — Welcome all partners including, Dr. Gordon Gow (University of Alberta), Dr. Dileeka Dias (Director Dialog Communication Research Lab), Prof Rohan Samarajiva (Director LIRNEasia), Mr.
Rohan Samarajiva and Gordon Gow developed a set of standard operational procedures for the Last-Mile Hazard Warning System. The manual titled “Guidelines for HIH“, provides the steps and actions need be taken by the actors and entities of the Sarvodaya’s Last-Mile Hazard Warning System. A 1-day workshop was held today at the Sarvodaya Community Disaster Management Center, “Samana Teta”, to train and introduce the literature in the guidelines to the HIH staff members. Another workshop will be held on July 21, 2006 to introduce the standard operational procedures to the Community First-Responders. The program is a 1 day event to be held at the Sarvodaya Damsak Mandiraya in Moratuwa.
Thursday Evening, 5:00PM Sri Lanka Foundation Institute 100 Independence Square, Colombo This lecture is free and open to the public. The lecture will address all-hazards warning and the use of the Common Alerting Protocol in disaster mitigation. Gordon Gow is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Extensions at the University of Alberta, Canada. Co-author of the book: “Mobile and Wireless Communication: An Introduction” and most current book: “Policymaking for Critical Infrastructure”. Moreover, he is the communication systems consultant for “Evaluating a last-mile Hazard Dissemination: A Research Project” in Sri Lanka.
Nuwan Waidyanatha – Project Manager, Last Mile Hazard Warning System The socioeconomic belief is that a CAP message relay is one way of effectively managing disasters, and that is what is envisioned in the Last-Mile Hazard Warning System (LM-HWS) Pilot Project. I will be talking about the current Workpackage of the LM-HWS project, which is developing the Hazard Information Hub (HIH). The general objective of the LM-HWS project is to evaluate the suitability of a selected set of ICT that can communicate CAP messages and alert the village first-responders. The Sarvodaya HIH was specifically built with the intension of providing structured risk information such as CAP messages to the local communities.
LIRNEasia organised a press conference to highlight two major initiatives in the area of hazard warning, one that it launched on providing disaster mitigation and last-mile connectivity to tsunami-affected villages and the other that it wrapped up on dam-related hazard warning system for Sri Lanka. LIRNEasia released A Concept Paper for a Dam-related Hazard Warning System in Sri Lanka: A Participatory Study on Actions Required to Avoid and Mitigate Dam Disasters in collaboration with its project partners, the Vanguard Foundation, Sri Lanka National Committee on Large Dams (SLNCOLD), Intermediate Technology Development Group (ITDG) and Sarvodaya. This work was funded by the Canada Fund for Local Initiatives. Prof. Rohan Samarajiva, Executive Director of LIRNEasia, handed over the final concept paper to U.
LIRNEasia is undertaking a project to provide disaster mitigation training and last-mile connectivity to tsunami-affected villages along the coast of Sri Lanka. The effectiveness of training and five different ICT technologies that will be deployed will be assessed with a view of rolling out the most successful strategies and technologies in 226 tsunami-affected Sarvodaya villages. This IDRC funded project is partnered with Sarvodaya, Vanguard Foundation, Dr. Gordon Gow, LSE, UK, TVE Asia Pacific, Sri Lanka and the Community Tsunami Early-Warning Center (CTEC) at Peraliya. In the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004, it was evident that if Sri Lanka along with the other affected countries had an effective disaster warning system in place, many lives could have been saved.