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 ‘Mobile Phones’
Orange You Glad You Have 3G?
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.
MTN Money: Long Lines and Bank Competition
A long hiatus, but now I’m back! I’ve been a bit swamped with teaching and travel – but still there’s so much going on here that I want to share.
One thing I’ve noticed recently is that the MTN Service Center has become swamped lately – there are frequently crowds of people there waiting in line. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Talk to your Senator about Conflict Coltan
As many of you know, Goma, DRC is the site of much mineral wealth – as well as much conflict, both over this wealth, and ethnic conflicts, including remnants of the Hutu/Tutsi hatred that resulted in the Rwandan genocide.
Just as diamonds are mined to finance these conflicts – coltan (used in the Sony PS2 and [...]
Poynting Antennas and Wilson Antennas
I’m posting this here mostly for my own future reference:
I’ve been using tri-band antennas from Wilson Antennas, but unfortunately they don’t actually work in the places where you need the antennas because, well they’re made for the US-based frequencies (e.g. 1900, rather than 1800)
Jeff Wishnie from Inveneo points out this antenna for boosting signal strength:
This [...]
Mobile Phone Microscope
So last year, our co-winners in the Bears Breaking Boundaries IT for Society contest was a group of students working on attachments for cell phone cameras that could be used for microscopy diagnosis of diseases like malaria. Since then both of our projects have been taken up by the Blum Center for Developing [...]
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 [...]
Networking on a Smart Phone
So as part of this ongoing drama of making sure that network traffic originating in Ghana actually stays here instead of wandering off to Europe and coming back (sorry for the jargon: if this doesn’t make sense to you, the rest probably won’t either), I’ve been trying to set up ping and traceroute and various [...]
