Detecting disease-mobile way

CHENNAI: A new model of disease surveillance in rural areas using a mobile phone is set to open a big window of opportunity for the government as well as the private sector who collect and collate data for health research, according to vice-president of IIT Madras’s Rural Technology and Business Incubator, Suma Prashant.

It all began two years ago when Suma’s team set up launched its Real-Time Biosurveillance Programme (RTBP) as a pilot project. Over the last two years, the project has been implemented in 28 rural healthcare centres (four public healthcare centers and 24 health sub-centres) covering 87,000 population in 200 villages of Thirupathur block in Sivaganga district.

The project involves nurses working in rural areas being given mobile phones through which they can send e-mails about patients in their respective areas to a specific email-id. The information goes to a data centre, where it is logged and specialized tools are used to interpret data.

The success of the project has made the government sit up and take notice. “RTBP officials are in discussions with the Tamil Nadu government to scale it up. We may focus on the whole of Sivaganga district covering roughly 16 lakh population,” says Suma.

The system could be extended to other areas, such as getting real-time data on crop diseases and tracking water levels in rural areas, says Prof Ashok Jhunjhunwala chairman of RTBI.

The RTBP project is being run in collaboration with collaboration National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore and LIRNEasia, Sri Lanka.

“The project will help health officials easily detect the outbreak of disease in advance and build capacity in the communities to receive notifications and respond to such warnings rapidly and systematically,” informs Jhunjhunwala.

“We are planning to make the technology simpler by adding voice technology so that it would be easier for the village health nurses to operate,” he says. Interestingly, most of the health workers on the project had earlier never used SMS and some of them had no knowledge of handling mobile phone for voice interaction. “We faced initial hiccups in using the mobile applications but we recovered from it,” says village health nurse Kaliyammal.

N Waidyanatha, the project director of LIRNEasia, says the technology wou- ld reduce the cost significantly. “It won’t cost more than $7 to $8 per day for transmitting data by a PHC for 120 people,” he adds.