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Have a great idea and the credentials to get it done but need resources or partnership with a large organization? Here’s an offer which may help. As part of a program called TechQuest, Alcatel-Lucent is seeking applications from wireless / mobile technology experts for applications in the areas of public safety, entertainment, eHealthcare and eLearning. This program, TechQuest, is a match maker between companies and innovators. This program is managed by an organization called MTBC in Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas. It is a good model for telecom companies to attract expert innovators and researchers. Here’s how the program works:
Through TechQuest, small tech companies, university researchers, and industry technologists, the Innovation Providers, have an opportunity to present their technology-based ideas and business plans to a major company, an Innovation Seeker, from the Dallas/Ft.Worth area. Those connections may result in technology licensing, funding, a customer/supplier relationship or a strategic partnership.
Here’s the information about this TechQuest program from Alcatel-Lucent. More information about the process and other TechQuest programs is provided at the MTBC site. Note that the Innovation Providers don’t have to be from Dallas area.
Problem Statement
The bandwidth of mobile uplinks and downlinks as well as data latency parameters promise to be much improved over currently available 3G services with the advent of LTE and 4G wireless broadband technologies. Alcatel-Lucent is seeking applications and services that will benefit from this improved connectivity especially in these key areas:
Background Information:
Long Term Evolution (LTE) and Fourth Generation wireless networks (4G) will provide much higher data rates for mobile devices and applications than existing solutions. The LTE specification is defined and telecommunications equipment vendors are already executing contracts with carriers to deploy LTE gear. The definition of 4G is a bit more nebulous as standards are still being defined; however 4G has objectives of 100Mbits/s bandwidth between any two points in the world (although much higher rates have been lab tested) and support of IPv6.
More information on LTE specifications can be found at www.3gpp.org/article/lte.
I am sharing a paper I came across at Cisco mobility community site. This site, sponsored by Cisco, aims to provide a venue for education and to encourage conversations about mobile technologies such as 4G, WiMAX etc and related business, policy and social aspects. Anyone can join the site and participate.
The paper is titled “Expanding the Reach of Health Care in Developing Nations with WiMAX.” Here’s the direct link to the pdf. It talks about various case studies of using WiMAX connectivity to expand and improve health care in developing nations. However there are no details about the costs and the infrastructure hurdles which are so critical to WiMAX.
The paper mentions a project in Pakistan.
In Pakistan, Cisco is working on a trial that combines satellite and WiMAX connectivity to mobile units that provide earlier oncological screening to rural patients. Female patients feel more comfortable seeking care in a familiar environment, close to their homes. Earlier screening allows doctors to detect breast cancer in women when it is still treatable.
As illustrated below, WiMAX may initially be used mainly as a backhaul technology to provide basic data and voice connectivity to clinics. At a later stage, mobile applications will take on a larger role as network coverage, low cost devices, and mobile telemedicine applications become available.
The paper lists the key benefits WiMAX brings to telemedicine as:
TeleomPk has been providing coverage of Telehealth or mobile health work in Asia. This post is a summary of the various efforts going on but of course, its not comprehensive. It would be great to have a national website where doctors, scientist, technologists, social workers and other stakeholders can discuss, share and publish their work.
Let’s start with research at the Next Generation Intelligent Networks Research Center of FAST University, Islamabad. Their work on Remote Patient Monitoring System with Focus on Antenatal Care (see past post) is funded by the National ICT R&D fund, Government of Pakistan, over the period of 3 years (2008-2010). The primary objective of this project is to develop a reliable, efficient and easily deployable remote patient monitoring system that can play a vital role in providing basic health services to the remote village population of Pakistan at their door step.
There’s more innovative work in this area by other groups as well. In this interview, Jehan Ara talks with a Pakistani researcher Jahanzeb Sherwani (prior coverage here) who has done doctoral level research at CMU about using speech recognition with local languages to collect information regarding rural health care. In this interview he talks about expanding the work out of the labs and to include more local languages. Excerpt from a post by Jehan Ara.
Jahanzeb has been more excited about the HealthLine PhD project that he has been working on with Hands, an NGO. Speech recognition is, he believes, the equalizer, the ultimate enabler. It doesn’t matter if you are illiterate or if you speak a different language.
LIRNEAsia also publishes work on m-health topic quite often. Much of their work looks at running surveys and working with local communities to gather data and to test out the technologies. They also work with Carnegie Mellon university on Bio-surveillance work.
Of course when it comes to developed countries there’s a lot of emphasis on reducing cost and for providing connected services whereby automation and intelligence can make devices and testing smart. Here’s ATT vision for medical remote monitoring (source: Fast Company). A number of other companies are active in this area. There’s also interest in providing monitoring and emergency services for senior citizens.
Lirneasia also publishes work on m-health topic quite often. Much of their work looks at running surveys and working with local communities to gather data and to test out the technologies. They also work with Carnegie Mellon university on Bio-surveillance work.
Please suggest any other sources which you think should be covered. Here’s another report from Africa about health care improvement.
Cell phones may have changed the way people communicate in the developed world, but in developing countries they’re going far beyond simple communication to bring new opportunities to areas that sorely need them. Case in point: FrontlineSMS:Medic, a new initiative to improve health care in poor, rural villages.
Continuing with E-Learning Series, here is a great example of how video based lectures can be used for education and for spreading knowledge. MIT World is a free and open site that provides on demand video of significant public events at MIT. See this video on Providing Chips and Technology for a World with Four Billion Cellular Subscribers. The video shows how industry and academia collaboration can work. Also note the telemedicine potential mentioned – see telemedicine related posts here.
Researchers at FAST National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences, Islamabad Campus have reached the finals of the World Summit Youth Award (WSA) 2009. Their project “Remote Patient Monitoring with focus on antenatal care” has been shortlisted as the top 3 projects among 612 projects submitted from 102 countries. Congratulations to the research group and FAST Islamabad. The project is in part funded by National ICT R & D Fund, a good validation for their efforts over the years to promote grassroots research in Pakistan. See the Youth Summit Awards website for more information.
Here is the team list:
Ajay Kumar Tanwani (Research Engineer)
Mudaser Ahmed (Research Engineer)
Sajjad Athar (Research Engineer)
Humayun Irshad (Research Engineer)
Muhammad Kamran (Research Associate)
Jawad Masood (Research Student)
Asad Mehmud (Research Student)
Jamal Afridi (Research Student)
Irfan Khan (Research Student)
Also posted at: In the line of Wire.
In the first funding of its type, Universal Service Fund of Pakistan (USF) provided contracts worth Rs. 1.4 Billion in total, for providing Broadband Services in the un-served urban areas of Faisalabad Telecom Region (FTR). PTCL and Wateen Telecom won this round of contracts: PTCL will provide 72,500 broadband connections and Wateen Telecom will provide 16,500 connections. The Faisalabad telecom region comprises of districts of Faisalabad, Jhang, Sargodha, Toba Tek Singh, Khushab, Bhakkar and Mianwali, excluding the served city of Faisalabad.
Readers of this blog may recall the earlier posts that we did to highlight and appreciate the work by USF and its leadership. Universal Service Fund (USF) is made up of contributions by telecom service providers of Pakistan. In the last decade, Pakistan has made impressive progress in providing voice telephony services crossing 60% tele-density, but broadband proliferation in the country is still very low and there are less than 300,000 broadband connections in the country. Furthermore, almost all these connections are concentrated in around 15 big cities of the country. Universal Service Fund (USF) is working to bridge that gap.
USF has ambitious and comprehensive plans to improve lives through broadband and connectivity. Read more information from the USF press release:
CEO of USF, Parvez Iftikhar, informed that FTR, has 56 towns and cities of various sizes with numerous potential broadband users like, hospitals, distance learning centers of Open University, Banks, NADRA centers/kiosks, Government Offices, Libraries, Courts, Industries and various other institutions, in addition to a population of more than 3 Million that could benefit. He further informed that a major highlight of this project will be the establishment of more than 250 Educational Broadband Centres in all the High-Schools and Colleges in these towns and cities, besides more than 100 Community Broadband Centres will be set up which will provide Broadband to those who cannot afford their own computers. He acknowledged the tremendous cooperation, help and support of the Ministry of IT and PTA, without which this landmark could not be achieved.
CEO USF also informed that bids for the next three similar projects have already been called through Press and Websites for the areas around Multan, Hyderabad and Mansehra. These will be followed by more projects till the whole country is covered. Moreover, bids for three more Projects of Basic Rural Telecom and two of Optic Fiber expansion in Baluchistan are also awaited.
Nokia has proved that it can not only connect but care too. The press release below from Nokia below says it all.
The Indus Hospital Research Center and Nokia Pakistan announced the successful implementation of INTERACTIVE ALERTS, an electronic surveillance system for pneumonia in Karachi at a press conference held at the Indus Hospital. The Interactive Alerts system was designed by Interactive Research and Development (IRD), in collaboration with the Next Billion Network program at the MIT Media Lab.
The Interactive Alerts system has been specifically developed to use the Nokia 6131 NFC phone for childhood pneumonia surveillance and referral in low-resource settings, although it can be easily extended to other diseases. At the time of the 6-week vaccination visit, children are given a radio frequency ID (RFID) tag in the form of a traditional bracelet. This tag provides a unique ID to the child, and parents are advised and encouraged to take sick children to participating general practitioner clinics or general hospitals in the program. At each encounter, the Nokia 6131 NFC phone is used to scan the child’s tag. Pertinent immunization, clinical and laboratory data is collected and posted to the server via GPRS in real-time, and can be viewed over a secure website.
The innovativeness of this approach is that it helps overcome the challenges of disease tracking and patient referral in settings where medical records and referral systems do not exit. The RFID bracelet provides unique identification, allowing health workers to verify identity and view basic medical records, and respond to emergencies quickly.
Pneumonia is a leading cause of childhood death in countries with high under-5 mortality rates. Invasive pneumococcal disease is the # 1 vaccine-preventable cause of death in children under 5 years of age. The World Health Organization estimates that up to 1 million children under 5 die each year due to pneumococcal diseases.
IRD has established pneumonia surveillance in Karachi in collaboration with the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health (JHSPH), the Program for Appropriate Technologies in Health (PATH) and the Indus Hospital. The objective of collecting this data is to provide policy makers in Pakistan and in the region the information required for introducing appropriate and new vaccines against pneumonia for children.
Interactive Alerts was co-developed by IRD’s health informatics team, led by Omar Allawala (Director of Information Technology) and Julia Irani (IT Project Manager),and a team of researchers and students from the Next Billion Network at MIT. The MIT team proposed the idea of using the Nokia NFC phones, and produced an initial design and working prototype, from which the IRD team then developed the final product.
Commenting on the project, Damien Balsan, Director, Head of NFC Business Development Americas, Nokia said, “We believe in a world where connecting people to what matters empower them to make the most of every moment. NFC is one of the ways to define the Nokia vision in terms of community services. We are committed to this project to ensure its expansion to a greater geographical area.”
This is a very encouraging step, finally we are seeing some research oriented approach in the communication industry of Pakistan. In my view IRD should come up with more projects of similar kinds and get Pakistani students on board to work along. Such initiatives will in turn acheive the main objective of all communication devices, i.e. serving the humanity in a better way!
This post is about Jahanzeb Sherwani’s speech related research work which I mentioned briefly here. The idea is to provide speech-based telephone information system in local language (pilot test is in Sindhi) for community health workers. The advantage of this system is that you don’t need a smart phone, you don’t need a computer, you just need something that can make a phone call, Jahanzeb says.
This pioneering work is ongoing and this is first in a series of posts on this project. I am very pleased to present this positive effort to a broader audience and intend to keep you posted on its progress.
Most of the information is taken from the project website at Carnegie Mellon. The site has detailed information including link to the full pdf report, videos and list of related publications.
Community health workers in developing countries are often trained only for a few months before they begin providing health services, and have a great need to access updated and reliable health information. The HealthLine project’s goal is to design an information access system specifically for such health workers, which they can call any time, toll-free, from any cell phone or landline. Through a spoken conversation with the system in their native language, they would be able to learn more and/or fill in any health information gaps that they may have. This would in turn enable them to provide better health services to their community.
HealthLine is a collaborative research project involving Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA), Aga Khan University (Karachi, Pakistan) and the Health & Nutrition Development Society (Karachi, Pakistan).
The project started with interviews in 2007 to help understand the context in which health worker do their job, their literacy and comprehension skills, as well as their baseline health information needs. By May 2008, the researchers completed a series of user studies with health workers in rural Sindh to understand their preferences with respect to speech-based information access as compared to text-based information access. One major finding was that the initial choice of Urdu as the target language was sub-optimal, as community health workers often are not always fluent in Urdu — even though they may have attended school up till 5th grade.
Based on this finding, the team started re-building prototypes in Sindhi, and is conducting user studies with health workers of varying literacy levels to evaluate the prototypes through objective metrics (such as task success rate, task completion time) and subjective metrics (user ratings).
Link to the paper is here.
There are many other telemedicine projects and companies in Pakistan. Few of them get coverage outside Pakistan. I found this story, which appeared at MarketWatch and other sites, to be interesting, though it reads a bit like marketing for IBM and Wateen. In an upcoming post I will share related work being carried out by Pakistani researchers.
Part of the funding came from the U.S. Department of State under the U.S. Government’s Digital Freedom Initiative, which “seeks to encourage the spread of technology to the developing world.”
A 5-year-old boy in Pakistan no longer has to suffer without treatment of an irritating skin rash thanks to care from a doctor in a city 110 miles from his rural village.
The high-tech telemedicine system that made the treatment possible was implemented with the leadership of a company on the other side of the world: Armonk-based IBM Corp.
IBM was tapped by the State Department to lead a public-private partnership that includes Wateen Telecom, Motorola Inc., Medweb Inc., the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Defense Department Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center and the Pakistani government.
The telemedicine system links the “hub” of Holy Family Hospital in the city of Rawalpindi, Punjab province, with the “spoke” of District Headquarters Hospital in Attock, which has limited resources to treat thousands of surrounding villagers.
Doctors in Rawalpindi, armed with personal computers and videoconferencing equipment, “see” patients remotely and confer with their counterparts at the district hospital.
Medical records and information, including digital photos of skin lesions, for example, are shared via a wireless network provided by Motorola and Wateen Telecom and navigated with Medweb software.
Dr. Sadia Rafiq, the IBM medical consultant for the Pakistan Telemedicine Project, said just 16 primary-care doctors work in Attock while there is a need for 64.
There are no radiologists, pathologists, dermatologists or many other specialists. If a villager needs additional care, he or she often cannot afford the trip to the larger hospital in Rawalpindi.
As a result, Rafiq said, ailments that aren’t emergencies are ignored. Since the telemedicine project became active this summer, patients have come in with complaints that had been ignored, including a goiter that was untreated for 30 years.
“The simple diseases that are not treated before can now be treated,” she said.
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