Dhaval Joshi
Nokia Research Center
Bengaluru, India
Dhaval Joshi is a researcher at the Nokia Research Center in Bangalore. His research areas include health, agriculture, learning for emerging markets, grassroots mobile services, and the use of mobile technologies as transformation tools. Dhaval Joshi applies a range of methodologies in his research such as experimental technology pilots, and immersive field based user research probes. Prior to joining Nokia Research, he worked at Motorola Research Labs India, where he was actively involved in doing research for mobile internet user experiences and the design of services for emerging markets. He holds a postgraduate Diploma from the National Institute of Design, India with specialization in Interface Design.
research.nokia.com
research.nokia.com
Mobile Health Services for Developing Countries
Motivation
Communicable diseases are a huge challenge to developing countries like India. The Health infrastructure and process are constantly burdened by the evergrowing outbreaks of diseases. While the government of India is increasing the role of information and communication technology (ICT) in its disease surveillance practices, up to date, disease related data are not digitized at the grassroots level, but rather, at district or state levels. This delay in information availability at times proves to be a barrier in effectively controlling the spread of diseases
Approach
Nokia Research Center, in collaboration with the Medical School at Manipal University and Primary Health Centers carried out an experimental field trial designing a system to monitor the spread of diseases in near -real time and making this information available to the stakeholders on the ground in order to help them make informed decisions quickly at their local level.
Conclusion
Easy input methods, enabled by both SMS and voice-based input, helped primary health center workers
to adopt the reporting a regular practice.
For health officers & doctors, the comprehensive reporting
with visualization made it easy to recognize the health status all the way from their own health centers to the district level
Being able to aware the reporting status of
other neighboring districts was one of the
reasons for regular uses
For health officers & doctors, the comprehensive reporting
with visualization made it easy to recognize the health status all the way from their own health centers to the district level
Being able to aware the reporting status of
other neighboring districts was one of the
reasons for regular uses
Extensions
Mobile based Health Services have huge potential to lighten the burden on existing health infrastructure, especially when it comes to public health management.
Areas of open/accessible health services to the masses could help create a big change from the grassroots level
References
Chasing Disease Down