Detecting communicable diseases before it reaches an epidemic state is vital. The challenge lies in receiving health information in a timely manner in order to prevent diseases reaching epidemic states. The current surveillance system does not provide the much needed “real-time” information flow and analysis to detect such an event of increased number of scattered cases. The real-time detection shortcomings can be easily overcome with reliable and robust Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) and Intelligent Software (SW).
In one of our projects “Evaluating a Real-Time Biosurveillance Program – a pilot project” Health-related information gathered through mobile handheld devices will be communicated through the Wireless Local Loop (WLL) Networks to a central Database (DB) for analytics and monitoring. The ICT system will use General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), Short-Message-Service (SMS) as transport technologies to enable access to SW applications to communicate information on surveillance and alerting. How much of it will be suitable to the current circumstances will be assessed by measuring the performance during the course of the project.click here for more information
Platforms Used for the development:
Server Platform:
Linux Operating system
Apache Web server
PHP 4.0 and above
Mysql 4.0 and above
Mobile Platform:
J2ME (CLDC 1.1 and MIDP 2.0)
WAP and GPRS
Can Quality health care be provided in rural areas where the villagers are contesting distance to access a nearest fully functional healthcare facility it is possible to provide and support healthcare delivery through a medical device and software application developed by Neurosynaptic Communications Pvt Ltd. (NCPL) known as ReMeDi (Remote Medical Diagnostics). It is a telemedicine provider device which connects the rural villages & remote areas to the urban medicos. This device measures four vital signs of human body, viz heart rate, rhythm, body temperature, blood pressure & blood oxygenation. This device revolutionizes the traditional way of diagnosing the patient through ECG, stethoscope, sphygmomanometer & pulse oximeter.
ReMeDi is a device which acts as bridge between a patient at a remote area & a specialist at a different end. It is connected through internet. This device is placed at villages Kiosks centers, where a trained operator assists the patient to get connected to the doctor with the help of ReMeDi & transfer relevant data to the doctor, who uses the information to diagnose & prescribe medicine. This device allows real time communication between the patient & the doctor via videos, audio, text chat. It can capture pictures of the patient & store them long with the patient’s medical record. The basic requirement of this device is a standard configured computer with internet connection.
Another Project is directed towards training, mentoring and supporting local health care providers to deliver simple primary health interventions. By harnessing the potential of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in creative ways the project boasts of an e-learning programme to improve providers’ knowledge and skills, development of online patient records and online purchase of low cost commodities and public health products.
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The Rural Banking Project has been designed to address the Banking needs of the rural population, who most often, do not have access to formal Banking Services. The project intends to bridge some of the gaps left by Micro finance institutions.
The Rural Banking project works under the Business Correspondent Model approved by the Reserve Bank of India. The Business Correspondent is the outsourced arm of the Bank which performs Banking business through its designated agents. The intention behind the model is to promote the Business of Bank with low capital cost by enabling outsourcing of rural business to agents on a commission basis.
The system has biometric fingerprint authentication for kiosk operator and business correspondent login.
RTBI has partnered with SBI in performing a pilot of this Business Correspondent model . Internet Kiosks are being used for the purpose of the pilot. The pilot experiment is being done at select four villages in Mayiladuthurai in Nagapattinam District of Tamil Nadu using the services of a Business Correspondent. Under the current model, the Kiosk operators who own the kiosks at the villages, enroll as agents of the Business Correspondent, and are trained extensively in Banking by the Bank, and these agents act like mini-branches in the villages helping villagers do their banking at a nearby location.To start with, a minimum number of products are being launched to test the functioning of the model. Once the model is proven success, the model can be scaled up across the country in a number of villages and a plethora of banking services can be delivered using this model. The benefits of this model are manifold:
Banking services can be offered to the rural population at close vicinity.
Making Kiosk –operators as the agents of the Business Correspondent, helps in building rural entrepreneurs.
The bio-metric authentication helps illiterate people also operate bank accounts comfortably.
The Bank in turn benefits greatly because of the improved business adding to the bottom line of the Bank.
National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) under the ‘Ministry of Rural development’ strives for the enhancement of rural livelihood by providing at least one hundred days of guaranteed wage employment in every financial year to every household whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work. Ministry of Rural development (MoRD) has developed a Professional Institutional Network (PIN) for steady, sustainable interventions that enhance the quality of the NREGA to undertake concurrent monitoring and appraisal, evaluation and impact assessment and research. The Ministry has approached Rural Technology and Business Incubator (RTBI) of IIT Madras to conduct the impact assessment study in the state of TamilNadu. The mobile phones are used to collect the survey information. RTBI is a dedicated arm of IIT Madras fostering rural based initiatives in rural TamilNadu.
Data collection was aided by innovative GPRS Mobile Technology, Remote Multimedia Enterprise Data Entry & Processing System (REMEDY) which provides an ideal solution for multimedia information aggregation using a mobile phone which connects to an enterprise database.
The system consists of an easily configurable web interface for form creation, generates the required server side scripts and database schemas to interface to an enterprise database. This application is a novelty as it not only supports the form input information but also the images captured, voice samples recorded at the field location by the enterprise database.
Data is uploaded whenever the mobile phone can establish a GPRS connection to the enterprise database. In the absence of a GPRS connection, data gathering and validation can still be done locally on the mobile. This stored data is later uploaded whenever the GPRS connection becomes available. Report generation in various formats also supported.
Context:
Considering ~70% of India lives in rural areas and their limited access to efficient energy resources, there are many interesting products that have been rolled out over the past few years to serve their energy needs. These products, through technology and design innovations, aim to create more positive social impact than the conventional products that serve the same customer needs. However, large scale commercial sale of these products have been quite a challenge.
Strategic Intent:
GoScale.in is a web based portal that provides the scope for product manufacturers to share details about their products and reach out to a wider audience. It collects feedback on product performance directly from the user which, if positive, would give confidence to entities working in rural areas to trust the product better and if negative, provide useful suggestions to manufacturers for improving their product to better serve rural customer needs. Even though it is a web based portal, it is designed to receive inputs from customers via the telephone. This unique feature enables it to easily interact with rural customers who may not have access to the internet. As is well known, mobile telephone penetration in rural areas is much higher than that of the internet in India. We, thus, believe this portal simultaneously solves for two existing gaps in enabling efficient access to energy in rural areas: It lays the ground work for catapulting products that serve rural customers to scale up and address larger markets and It provides valuable market intelligence into rural customer needs.
Operating Framework:
This is being jointly developed by RENE (Rural Energy Network, IFMR Trust) with Rural Technology and Business Incubator (RTBI).