3G is a game changer.
As I mentioned in my last post, new technologies are being introduced primarily by the mobile service providers. And for as much as I’m developing bits and pieces of software, my research is to introduce these technologies to the healthcare service providers (HSPs), to educate them on their use, and to [...]
Posts under ‘Claim Mobile’
Orange You Glad You Have 3G?
Entrepreneurship in Uganda
I’ve always thought that Africa was full of entrepreneurs – thousands of people eking out a living in container stores and markets selling goods a minimal profit, so they can support their families, send their kids to school, and, in general, survive.
Now, there’s clearly a difference between the startups of Silicon Valley that get venture [...]
Bringing ICTs and Solar to Rural Uganda
Claim Mobile Part Deux: We’ve set up netbooks and phones in three clinics so far (two bundled with solar power), and we’re looking to see how the introduction of these new technologies change the management of health care information and communication between the OBA health facilities and the OBA management agency, as well as the management of health information within the OBA health facility itself.
They Fixed the Kindle!
Omigoodness. I managed to get my hands on a Kindle 2 this past weekend and aside from the fact that the Whispernet (Amazon’s renaming of Sprint’s EVDO Internet service) is totally inaccessible for me, and it would be an absolute pain for me to actually put any books on the device, I really really really [...]
First HealthyBaby Birth
As I have been pre-occupied with writing lectures for my class, and setting up my research, my collaborating partners at Marie Stopes International Uganda have been busy launching a new phase of the output-based aid voucher program, financing in-hospital delivery of babies, in addition to the in-clinic treatment of sexually-transmitted infections (STIs). The [...]
Ubuntu-ifying the eeePCs (Netbook Mania Part II)
(Warning: This one is for the techies)
So I mentioned before that I purchased a bunch of eeePCs to test out in the health clinics and to use in the management agencies as asyncronous web servers and health information management devices.
I suppose to some extent that in retrospect these clinics will have wanted Windows on these [...]
Netbook Mania
So one of the outcomes of my study last August is that admittedly.. people don’t want mobile phones for their health records, they want laptops. And these new netbooks – well they cost the same as these smartphones. But last August, the eeepcs had a battery life of 1.5 hours and only about [...]
Back in the Field
I’m on my way back out to Uganda, this time to run a pilot study of the software, working out some of the details of the design (co-design?) with the people in the management agency and the clinics, and doing a comparative study between a bunch of possible device platforms: Palm 680, Palm Centro, Blackberry [...]
Epocrates for developing countries?
So I’m talking to my doctor about possible drug interactions between various prescriptions and he pulls out a… (drum roll) palm treo. Oh okay so that’s probably not a major revelation.. doctors love Palm devices and have loved them pretty much since 3COM started making them back in the 90s. (Can I say that [...]
Event: Blum Student Symposium – Smartphones and Healthcare Information Management in Uganda
Hi all,
I gave a presentation at the Blum Student Symposium last Thursday.
For anyone that’s interested, the slides (65MB) are downloadable here:
http://tier.cs.berkeley.edu/~melissa/blum-symposium-oct-04-07.ppt
The talk was about current health information practices in rural health clinics in Uganda, how PDAs have been integrated into a particular district, and our projections for what we’re working on now.
The future symposiums look [...]
