jwesonga

I've spent the last 2 weeks in Dar es Salaam,Tanzania, helping setting up a mobile health project for one of the local NGOs,D-Tree International. The project is known as e-IMCI (more on that later).This has been one of the most interesting projects I've been involved in. I got involved in this project after I met Neal Lesh of Dimagi in NewYork early this year, what began as an email exchange between the two of us,ended up with me diving head first into this project. Essentially mHealth involves usage of mobile phones/technology in the area of health management.disease surveillance etc.

In this case we are using mobile phones to implement standard health protocol commonly known as IMCI-Integrated Management of Childhood Illness, I won't go into the details of the protocol since I'm not an expert in the public health field, but in a nutshell we are taking what is primarily a long paper based processed and pushing it to mobile phones,equipping and training clinicians with the necessary tools to administer the protocol effectively and efficiently. IMCI had previously been implemented on PDAs by Neal Lesh and other team members in South Africa a while back, the project had been very successful, scaling the project using PDAs was an obvious challenge considering the cost of the device and so they're arose the need to port the application to devices that were cost effective and readily available. A decision was made to redo the application using JavaRosa, the open source platform that Dimagi has spearheaded.

JavaRosa is a good platform, though not perfect it still offers the best option for a standardised method of data collection using mobile phones

We hope to launch this project in Arusha within the next few weeks, and see how the uptake will be in the field. The effectiveness of any technology is measured by the uptake and continued usage even after the initial launch.