Portable health clinic: A pervasive way to serve the unreached community for preventive healthcare

Ashir Ahmed, Sozo Inoue, Eiko Kai, Naoki Nakashima, Yasunobu Nohara

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

17 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

One billion people (15% of the world population) are unreached in terms of accessing to quality healthcare service. Insufficient healthcare facilities and unavailability of medical experts in rural areas are the two major reasons that kept the people unreached to healthcare services. Recent penetration of mobile phone and the unmet demand to basic healthcare services, remote health consultancy over mobile phone became popular in developing countries. In this paper, we introduce two such representative initiatives from Bangladesh and discuss the technical challenges they face to serve a remote patient. To solve these issues, we have prototyped a portable health clinic box with necessary diagnostic tools, we call it a portable clinic and a software tool, GramHealth for archiving and searching patients' past health records. We carried out experiments in three remote villages and in two commercial organizations in Bangladesh by collaborating with local organization to observe the local adoption of the technology. We also monitored the usability of the portable clinic and verified the functionality of GramHealth. We display the qualitative analysis of the results obtained from the experiment. GramHealth DB has a unique combination of structured, semi-structured and un-structured data which can be considered as BigData. We have partly analyzed the data manually to find common set of rules to build a better clinical decision support. The model of analyzing the GramHealth BigData is also presented.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationDistributed, Ambient, and Pervasive Interactions - First International Conference, DAPI 2013, Held as Part of HCI International 2013, Proceedings
Pages265-274
Number of pages10
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2013
Event1st International Conference on Distributed, Ambient, and Pervasive Interactions, DAPI 2013, Held as Part of 15th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCI International 2013 - Las Vegas, NV, United States
Duration: Jul 21 2013Jul 26 2013

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume8028 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Other

Other1st International Conference on Distributed, Ambient, and Pervasive Interactions, DAPI 2013, Held as Part of 15th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCI International 2013
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityLas Vegas, NV
Period7/21/137/26/13

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • Computer Science(all)

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