Mobile Health Without Borders (Online Course) – Review mHealth Solutions

As part of Mobile Health Without Borders online course, one of our assignments was to review and brainstorm mHealth solutions and share our findings within a week. I wanted to share briefly about how our team worked on this assignment.

I worked with Hormuz Vazifdar from Australia, Shruthi Prashanth from Dallas, and Mohit Goel from Delhi. It was fun working with them and considering that we were in different team zones, it was hard to schedule Skype calls. We had a lot of chat discussions on the team page.

The following screenshot contains the assignment instructions (retrieved on July 7, 2013).

We started off by thinking about probable health challenges:

• Create behavior communication strategies for patients who have dental problems.
• Train and equip maternal care givers in rural areas through mHealth technologies.
• Develop a product that can empower pregnant women to receive relevant information. 
• Develop a device that collects data from an infant and analyse it using a toolkit, which can be connected to a smartphone. 
• Develop a kit to test the babies for any ailments or symptoms.

I created a mindmap that lists the prominent factors of influence among people in rural areas that have very limited access to technologies. The team then researched the following existing responses to the above challenges such as:

• Community Outreach Programs
• Education Initiatives
• Localized Solutions based on Context
• Data Collection and Technology Intervention with Different Stakeholders

We brainstormed to create What-If problem statements. Few of them are:

• The dental patient wishes to create a medical dental history for his family. However, the patient is not aware of his previous medical history including his parents. How can he get started? Also, the patient needs to access their family medical history and explain it to his family members.

• The dental patient does not know to read and write. Usually, the patient forgets what the dentist tells him. How can he make a note of the information?

• The dental patient goes to a medical dispensary and finds that the prescribed medicine is not available. Whom and where should he contact for alternative medicines?

Then, we brainstormed and shortlisted five What-If statements and created scenarios. I’m sharing few below.

• How, when, and where can we arrange patients to have a regular dental check-up and maintain their records in the rural areas?

• How to ensure that patients remember their dental check-up schedule and avoid missing them?

• How to enable people to contact dentists if they have any queries regarding their dental issues, access to medicines, change of appointments etc.?

Few helpful references shared by Shruthi and Mohit for our assignment.

Maternal care

1. Midwives Connect – It is an m-health application that utilizes Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology to empower rural maternal caregivers that are usually overworked, poorly trained and equipped.
   Read more at http://www.medweb.com/docs/midwivesconnect.pdf.
2. IVR4BABY – A simple lack of knowledge and health education of women and their families in rural areas and developing countries is a key roadblock to improved maternal and infant care. With IVR4BABY, vital information for maternal and infant survival in isolated communities around the world can be delivered via mobile health technology.
   Read more at http://www.medweb.com/docs/ivr4baby.pdf.
3. Biosense – Non-invasive, instant, portable, anemia scanner. Visit www.biosense.in for more details.
4. Mobile midwife platform – Visit http://sites.path.org/mnhtech/assessment/emergency-obstetric-care/mobile-midwife-platform/technology-solution/.
5. Publications in the field of maternal health – Visit http://www.midwife.org/Key-MCH-Publications.
6. e-training modules aim to enhance skills of healthcare workers – Visit http://www.unfpa.org/public/home/news/pid/14145.
7. Intel and UNFPA to Boost Health Workers’ Skills – Visit http://www.unfpa.org/public/home/news/pid/9931.

Brainstorming

Conceptual Design in 2 minutes – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jo2SG4JhohQ.

It was great working with the team as everyone had different skill sets to complement each other. I look forward to working with them again!